Property; its duties and rights : historically, philosophically and religiously regarded

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PROPERTY

ITS DUTIES AND RIGHTS

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PROPERTY

ITS DUTIES AND RIGHTS

HISTORICALLY, PHILOSOPHICALLY
AND RELIGIOUSLY REGARDED

ESSAYS BY VARIOUS WRITERS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY

THE BISHOP OF OXFORD

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

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COPYRIGHT

GIFT OF

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

By CHARLES GORE, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Bishop of

Oxford ........ vii

I. THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF
PROPERTY, IN FACT AND IN IDEA

By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A., Professor of Sociology,

London University .... . . . i

II. THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF

PROPERTY

By the Rev. HASTINGS RASHDALL, D.LiTT., F.B.A.,

Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy, New College,
Oxford ; Canon of Hereford . . . . 9?

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE
PROPERTY

A. D. LINDSAY, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Balliol

College, Oxford . . . . . . . 65

M103878

vi PROPERTY

IV. THE BIBLICAL AND EARLY
CHRISTIAN IDEA OF PROPERTY

PAGE

By the Rev. VERNON BARTLET, D.D. (St. Andrews],
Professor of Church History in Mansfield College,
Oxford , 83

V. THE THEORY OF PROPERTY IN
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY

By the Rev. A. J. CARLYLE, D.Lrrr., Chaplain and
Lecturer in Political Science and Economics, Uni-
versity College, Oxford . . . . .117

VI. THE INFLUENCE OF THE RE-
FORMATION ON IDEAS CONCERNING
WEALTH AND PROPERTY

By H. G. WOOD, M.A., Late Fellow of Jesus College,
Cambridge ; Lecturer at Woodbrooke Settlement,
Birmingham . . . . . . 133

VII. PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY

By the Rev. HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, D.D., Regius
Professor of Divinity, Oxford, and Canon of Christ
Church . . . . . . . .169

INDEX .

INTRODUCTION

By the BISHOP OF OXFORD

I THINK that I shall best justify my appearance as
introducing this volume of Essays if I explain the
circumstances of their origin. Dr. Bartlet, of Mans-
field College, Oxford, had written a letter to the
British Weekly strongly urging upon Christians the
duty of reconsidering their ideas about property in the
light of the Bible doctrine of stewardship — the doctrine
that God the Creator is the only absolute owner of all
things or persons — that " all things come of Him " and
are " His own," and that we men hold what we hold as
stewards for the purposes of His Kingdom, with only a
relative and dependent ownership limited at every point
by the purpose for which it was entrusted to us. He
was good enough to send me his letter and to suggest
that we might combine to issue some literature of a
popular kind about the duties and rights of property
based on this Biblical doctrine.

Naturally I felt a cordial sympathy with the idea, but
I said that before anything of a popular kind was issued,
I thought that we needed some more thorough or philo-
sophical treatment of property in idea and history. The
Bible doctrine by itself makes an appeal of tremendous
force to the individual conscience. But the individual,
however deeply stirred in his conscience, however fully
convinced that he must not conform himself to the ideas

viii PROPERTY

of property which happen to be current in society but
must assert the Christian principle, finds himself in fact
in the bonds of an organized system of property. By
himself he can do very little. As a consumer, as a
shareholder, as a tradesman, as an owner of land, as
a shop assistant, as a clerk, as a workman, he finds
himself paralysed by the system of which inevitably he
forms a part. The system is not unalterable. It has
altered profoundly in more directions than one within
recent history, and is altering. But at every stage it
holds the individual in its grasp. Not even by "going
out of the world," not even were he to do so strange a
thing as to become a monk, can he get out of it. The
clothes he wears, the food he eats, the railways he
travels by, the books he buys, the State he belongs to,
hold him in the grip of the system. What he cries out
for, when his conscience is awakened, is not merely
personal guidance, but also ideas which can be applied
to society ; not merely again schemes for law-making,
but ideas such as must lie behind law-making and
without which law-making is in vain. He wants an
ideal of property, a principle of property, such as will
tend to form a corporate conscience, at first among those
who are consciously dissatisfied with things as they are
and consciously in want of a theory, and then more
widely in society as a whole.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, has just1 been
speaking noble and suggestive words to the lawyers of
the American Bar Association on the power of a common
mind, or common feeling as to what is legitimate and
illegitimate, when it has become instinctive and dominant
in a society. But this common mind about property is
conspicuously lacking amongst us. We are groping in
the dark. We are familiar with the traditional cry of
"the rights of property," and we are painfully familiar
also with the disastrous wrongs which the law and custom

1 September i, 1913.

INTRODUCTION ix

of property as it exists among us has inflicted and is
inflicting. But we want a theory, a principle to guide
us. We cannot act with any power as mere individuals
without a corporate mind and conscience on the subject ;
and we can form no corporate mind and conscience
without a clear principle. It was this principle, this
philosophy of property, in which, when I listened to
Dr. Bartlet's appeal, I felt myself lacking. Without it I
cannot play my part effectively as a citizen and still less
as a moral teacher. Any moral teaching which is to
grip men's minds requires it as a background. There-
fore, before engaging in a popular propaganda, I needed
to clear up the principle of property.

So I felt : so I knew others were feeling. And, Dr.
Bartlet agreeing, we set to work to get written a volume
of essays on property in which the subject should be
treated both from the standpoint of philosophy and of
religion. Divisions of the subjects were easily sug-
gested, and names of willing writers were finally forth-
coming ; and the present volume is the result of our
efforts. Mr. Leonard Hobhouse begins with a state-
ment of the early history of property and its later
developments. Dr. Rashdall and Mr. Lindsay deal with
the principle of property from the side of philosophy,
historically and critically. Dr. Bartlet, Dr. Carlyle, and
Mr. Wood give us the history of the treatment of pro-
perty in Christendom from the side of religion. Dr.
Holland concludes with an essay on the aspect of the
matter which the previous essays have shown to be of the
first importance — the relation of property to personality.
Some differences, of emphasis at least, will be felt
between different writers, but not such as to interfere
with a marked unity of tendency and result. After
reading these essays, I ask myself, How far have I and
those who share my need for guidance towards a working
principle of property got what we sought ? I answer
the question for myself by saying that the writers give

x PROPERTY

me the impression of having got to the root of the
matter ; they write with thorough and adequate know-
ledge and genuine impartiality ; and as a result they
help me most effectively to a standing-ground on cer-
tain dominant ideas or constructive principles by which
I can guide myself and feel assurance in seeking to
guide others, ideas and principles such as ought to have
power to form a corporate conscience or common mind
about property in the men of to-day — to act both as a
secure basis of policy in promoting reform and as a
ground of appeal to the Christian conscience.

Mr. Hobhouse shows the way in his distinction
between property "for use" and property "for power."
This is a most fruitful distinction. Aristotle was the
first to make the familiar appeal on behalf of private
property that it is necessary for the free development
of the higher life in the individual, and is the most
effective stimulus to character and personal exertion.
We are all familiar with the argument, and we feel its
force to the full. The average man wants the sphere
which he can call " his own " to stimulate him to
develop himself, to get room to move freely and
realize what he is capable of. Now Aristotle is able
calmly to contemplate this self-realization as the
privilege of the few — the freemen or citizens — while
the larger mass of the inhabitants of his city are to be
slaves, men conceived to exist not for themselves but
for their masters. To us this distinction is intolerable.
We are bound to believe that, whatever inequalities
must subsist among men, every man has the divine and
equal right to realize himself. The success of a civiliza-
tion for us must be measured not by the amount and
character of its products or material wealth, nor by the
degree of well-being which it renders possible for a
privileged class, but by the degree in which it enables
all its members to feel that they have the chance of
making the best of themselves, to feel that an adequate

INTRODUCTION xi

measure of free self-realization is granted them. On
this ground then our civilization is open to the most
serious indictment. Property " for use " — what a man
needs for true freedom, what even at the utmost he is
able to use — is a very limited quantity on the whole.
Very speedily, as it expands, it becomes " property for
power " : it becomes at last the almost unmeasured
control by the few rich, not of any amount of un-
conscious material, but of other men whose opportunity
to live and work and eat becomes subject to their will.
That is where property has so manifestly gone wrong.
In our own civilization we find vast masses of men
and women who cannot be reasonably described as
having any adequate measure of property for use.
They cannot go out into life with the security of free
men. They cannot, within reasonable limits, control
their own destiny. They cannot realize themselves.
They are "hands" for other men to use. The con-
viction rises in our mind as we contemplate the facts
that something has gone very wrong with our tenure
of property : that we need by peaceful means, and, if it
may be, by general consent, to accomplish such a re-
distribution of property as shall reduce the inordinate
amount of "property for power" in the hands of the
few and give to all men, as far as may be, in reason-
able measure " property for use." Then we ask our-
selves, Are we in entertaining such an ambition violating
any sacred right of property ? We interrogate the
philosophers, and we find under Dr. Rashdall's guid-
ance that we can discern no absolute right of property.
"Its justification must depend upon no a priori principle
but upon its social effects." We may say that a man
has a divine right to realize his being : and this involves
a certain right of property. But this goes but a very
little way. Moreover, from the first man is a social
animal. He realizes himself in communities. Property
is made possible and secured by the community, which

xii PROPERTY

becomes in developed society the State. The State exists
to enable its members to develop a worthy human life.
A State must be judged, and should judge itself, by its
tendency to generate in all its citizens a worthy type
of life — to make them happy and progressive beings
who feel that life is worth living. If at any stage it finds
that the institution of property, as it exists, is fostering
luxury and exaggerated power in a few, and enslaving
or hindering the many, there is nothing to prevent
it rectifying what is amiss. Property is relative to
character : it is a means towards a good life, and a
good life for all men. The State is free to alter its
laws or its methods so as to secure its better distribu-
tion. As it is only the State which enables a man
to become rich, so, if wealth proves inimical to the
general development, the possessors of wealth have no
legitimate claim to urge against the State taking measures
to redress the balance, provided that the end which the
State has in view is the true end — the real welfare of all
its citizens. No doubt, as Mr. Lindsay shows, it is a
difficult process to guard the sacred right of personal
freedom against State tyranny on the one hand, and on
the other to prevent the excess of individualism which
means in practice the enslavement of the many to the
few. But because it is difficult to direct human life
aright individually or socially, we must not, therefore,
abandon what alone makes human life worth living—
the effort to realize a worthy ideal.

And what has religion — the Christian religion which
exists to teach men that the end of their being is to
serve the glory of God and the real good equally of
themselves and of their fellows — to say to the institution
of property ? The Old Testament, on which Christianity
is based, describes the theocratic community ; and its
moral principles have, as the Christian is taught to
believe, a permanent validity — to be developed and not
to be superseded. Well then, a man cannot read the

INTRODUCTION xiii

law and the prophets from the point of view of one who
would think rightly about private property, without
seeing how, alike in the institutions of the law and in the
teaching of the prophets, the intention is to recognize
it, indeed, as having God's sanction, but to restrain it
by a peremptory insistence on the right of God, the
only absolute owner, and the rights of our fellow men,
especially the weaker and poorer members of the State.
Much that we are accustomed to hear called legitimate
insistence upon the rights of property, the Old Testa-
ment would seem to call the robbery of God, and the
grinding of the faces of the poor.

Later the teaching of Jesus Christ about the worth
of each individual, the poorest and the weakest, ex-
pressed itself in the Christian idea of brotherhood, and
the institution of the Church as a body in which " if
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it."
This idea and institution carried with it a doctrine of
property, which echoed our Lord's strong disparage-
ment of wealth, and was in theory and practice highly
communal. The Christians were a persecuted body,
who had no power of controlling the law or practice
of the society of the Empire ; but within their own
"voluntary" society the claim of the brethren was
paramount. The scoffer, Lucian, notes this as their
characteristic : " Their leader, whom they yet adore,
had persuaded them that they were all brethren : in
compliance with his laws they looked with contempt
on all worldly treasures and held everything in
common," or (as this is more accurately expressed),
" It is incredible with what alacrity those people defend
and support their common interests — the interest of
any of their number — and spare nothing, in short, to
promote it." Thus the Christian church became a
corporation for mutual support, refusing the idler who
would not work, but for the rest accepting the maxim
that they " must provide one another with support,

xiv PROPERTY

with all joy : furnishing those who lack occupation
with employment, and thus with the necessary liveli-
hood. To the workman, work ; to him who cannot
work, mercy (or alms)." l There is no doubt that this
profound sense of the communal claim on private
property and this practically effective sense of brother-
hood produced an economic condition in the Christian
community which was one main cause of its progress.
The Fathers use the strongest language against any
"right of property," which resists the claim of the
needs of the brethren. Dr. Bartlet writes with a
studied moderation about all this, and shows no little
insight in accounting for the disappointing fact that,
when Christianity became the established religion, it
did so little to impress its ideal of property upon the
law and custom of the later Empire. But certainly
the church bore the strongest witness to the idea of
property as a trust for the common good. And in
no way is this more strikingly shown than in its
identification of "charity" — that is, charity in the
narrower sense of almsgiving — with justice.2 The
needy can claim our alms as a matter of justice : to
retain more property than we strictly need is a violation
of justice, and not merely a failure to perform a work
of supererogation. Lord Hugh Cecil has recently
drawn a strong distinction between charity and justice.
He says "originally the relief of the poor was based on
the duty of Christian charity, and not on any supposed
right of justice." 3 As far as Early Christianity is con-
cerned the distinction here drawn would be repudiated.
To withhold charity is to refuse justice. And when we
pass from the Early Christian period to the Middle
Ages, when the whole fabric of society was in Christian

1 Pseudo-Clement, Ef. 8 ; see Harnaclc, Expansion of Christianity (Williams &
Norgate), i. p. 218.

2 This is especially but not exclusively characteristic of the Westerns — Cyprian,
Lactantius, Ambrose, etc.

3 Conservatism (Williams & Norgate), p. 172.

INTRODUCTION xv

hands we find the old principle asserted. Charity in
the form of tithe, and more generally distribution of
wealth to need, is still asserted to be justice and the
withholding of it injustice. " No man has really the
right to hold for himself more than he needs." And
the Stoic principle of a law of nature behind and con-
trolling the law of the State, is adopted in dealing with
property. Private property, and laws maintaining the
rights of private property, are necessary as a protection
against the lawlessness of fallen human nature ; but
behind the laws is the original principle by which all
things are common, which gives to every man his right
to what he needs, so that even stealing, St. Thomas
maintains, is no stealing if the need is sufficiently
urgent, and property has no claim which is valid
against the natural or fundamental right of every man
to enjoy the bounty of the Creator. It ought to be
added that in mediaeval society a very large share of
property was held by the religious houses, who at
their best maintained in practical action the principle of
voluntary poverty, and at their lower level exhibited
on the largest scale the principle of communal owner-
ship within their own membership and for the sake of
the poor.

Amongst the Reformers there were some who main-
tained the old Christian instinct unimpaired. No
nobler practical insistence on the true conception of
property can be found than is to be found in the
sermons of Hugh Latimer ; but, on the whole, the
candid reader of Mr. Wood's most interesting essay,
with its valuable catena of quotations, will feel that
Protestantism in general, and not least our English
Protestantism, embodied an excessive individualism,1 as

1 It may be the case that the greater individualism in the conception of
property which characterizes Protestant literature would be found to be more or less
characteristic of the thought of Europe generally, whether Protestant or Catholic,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to be due, not only to Protestant
tendencies, but to a widespread change in the economic structure of society.

xvi PROPERTY

in other respects so also in regard to property. It
abandoned much of the content which the Bible or
earlier Christianity had given to the commandment,
"Thou shalt not steal." It ushers in the epoch in
which the doctrine of the right of property is largely
stripped of its old limitations.1

What are we to say, then, about the still dominant
individualism, the assertion of an almost unlimited
right of acquiring, retaining, and perpetuating property,
which breaks out against either any strongly urged
moral claim for voluntarily giving better conditions
to the poorer workers as an act of justice, or against
any action of the State which tends in the direction
of a more equitable distribution of the proceeds of
industry ?

We are bound to say that, looking at the matter
philosophically, it has no validity. The particular laws
which at any moment regulate the holding of property,
or determine the burden which it is to bear for the
public good, are laws of the State ; it is the State which
alone enables property to be gathered and held; and there
is no legitimate claim which property can make against
what appears to be the welfare of the State. It is hardly
possible to state the principle too strongly. We are
only saying the same thing in other words if we say
that the tenure of property in any community must be
judged by its tendency to promote what alone is the

1 But out of the heart of the eighteenth century we do well to recall that Bishop
Butler, in defending the right of the lay holder of what had formerly been Church property
to retain his property with a good conscience, does so on grounds which involves the
principle that there is no absolute or perpetual right of property. " Property in general
is, and must be, regulated by the laws of the community. . . . Every donation to
the Christian church is a human donation and no more j and therefore cannot give
a divine right, but such a right only as must be subject in common with all other
property fo human laws. . . . The persons who gave these lands to the church had
themselves no right in perpetuity in them, consequently could convey no such right
to the church. But all scruples concerning the lawfulness of laymen possessing these
lands go upon the supposition that the church had such a right in perpetuity in them ;
and therefore all those scruples must be groundless as going upon a false supposi-
tion." See a letter of Bishop Butler's in Fitzgerald's edition of the Analogy, Preface,
p. xciii.

INTRODUCTION xvii

real end of civil society — that is, the best possible life
for man in general and all men in particular. If it
appears that the conditions of property-holding at any
particular period sacrifice the many to the few, and tend
to starve the vitality or destroy the hope or depress
the efforts of masses of men and women, there is no
legitimate claim that property can make against the
alteration of conditions by gradual and peaceable
means.

Can such a charge be made out against the present
conditions under which in our country property is
acquired and held or handed on ? I fear that it can be
made out and pressed home.

The stimulus of unlimited acquisition, it is some-
times pleaded, is necessary to bring out of men their
greatest capacity and energy. If you restrain a man's
freedom to acquire, you damp his energy. But what
about the energy of the masses of men who can acquire
no property or no sufficient property to give them
secure status and hope ? If you go some way towards
equalizing opportunity, as between one man and
another, will you not stimulate a thousand energies
and interests to one which you may check ?

The most formidable form of this plea is that which
represents to us that in modern industry the most im-
portant factor is the brain of the great organizer ; that
this will only work under the stimulus of unlimited
acquisition of wealth and personal power ; and that if
in our own country this power of unlimited acquisition
is restricted, the men of greatest initiative will go to
countries where no such restrictions exist, and our own
industrial life will suffer. This is a terrible argument
— the argument that what is most powerful in men
cannot be induced to act in the public interest but
only on the motive of unrestricted selfishness. There
are many experiences in modern industrial life to be
set against it. It may, however, be a motive for pro-

XV 111

PROPERTY

ceeding gradually in reforming industrial conditions,
and a ground for strengthening international fellowship
among reformers, so that similar tendencies may be
apparent in all countries. But it can never be a
ground for tying the hands of justice ; and it leaves
altogether out of account the stimulus to industry
which is to be anticipated in any country in which
more and more men in the industrial world can feel
that it is worth while to do their best.

Property in some sense is necessary for personality.
That is certainly true. Let us therefore be careful to
guard against any invasion of the real liberty of persons,
let us maintain the right of property " for use." But
how overwhelming is the indictment against present
conditions in their bearing on personality, the personality
of the mass of our countrymen. On this line Dr.
Holland brings the series of essays to a conclusion with
an argument which seems to me to be of overwhelming
force. And he calls attention to the root fact about
personality that it is in its fundamental being a social
thing — a relation of one individual to another ; and
that a legitimate development of personality involves a
legitimate development of fellowship.

The Roman poet contrasts the extravagance of
individual wealth in his own time with what he dis-
cerns to have been the ancient Roman ideal :

Privatus illis census erat brevis,
Commune magnum.1

Their private property was small : what was in common, that
was large.

These words echo in our mind. We cannot get rid
of the feeling that individualism in property has over-
done itself: that it is working disastrous havoc :
that the cry for justice from masses of men and

1 Horace, Carm. ii. 15.

INTRODUCTION xix

women is a cry which is legitimate ; and if it is a legiti-
mate cry, then most certainly it behoves us not to
wait till its claim can be enforced, grudging every inch
that is yielded unwillingly to "labour " under the
pressure of compulsion, but rather as free men to face
the facts and gird ourselves willingly for reform, even
if it entail for us personal sacrifice.

And here comes in the claim of our religion. We
have been unfaithful to its ancient instincts and to the
spirit of our Master. Speaking of the sixteenth and
again of the nineteenth century, and referring, I think,
to Europe at large, Harnack says : " The church was
generally on the wrong side, a fact which still rankles
in the memory of the nation, and is not without influence
on the economic struggle of the present day." l The
modern church has generally been on the wrong side.
Can we deny it ? Can we deny that its conceptions of
property and of the obligations of property, and its
attitude towards the real needs of the masses of men
who have held no property, or received no adequate
supply of what life needs for its development, have
been wholly different from what the teaching of the
prophets and our Lord, and our Fathers in Christendom,
would have had them to be ? In this respect, as in
others, our religion to-day is on its trial. The place it is
to hold in the minds of men in general and the genuine-
ness which can be ascribed to our profession of brother-
hood, depend on our courageous readiness to think
again what our Christian principles mean. What do
we honestly believe is God's will — Christ's will — for
en ? What do we mean when we say that we hold
ur property as stewards for God's purposes ? Do we
really believe that covetousness and the desire to
accumulate wealth — yes, and wealth itself — deserve all
that our Lord and His apostles said of them ? Do we
really acknowledge that if we are failing to redeem our

1 The Social Gospel (Williams & Norgate), p. 63.

xx INTRODUCTION

brothers and sisters from misery and want, we are
failing to redeem Christ ? And if we genuinely mean
what we should mean, and believe what we say, are we,
as Christians, ready for a deep and courageous and
corporate act of penitence and reparation ?

I

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
OF PROPERTY, IN FACT AND IN IDEA

BY

L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, LONDON UNIVERSITY

SUMMARY

1. The general notion of property. It is a right of control over things
which society recognizes. It may be absolute or partial, held by one
person or many, or by a community, but it must be exclusive as against
others, and it must have some permanence.

2. The connection of property with rational purpose, and with freedom.

3. The opposition, in this regard, between property held for use by its
owner, and property as a means of controlling the labour of others.

4. Property is a recognized institution in all known societies ; but in
the simpler societies it is rarely, if ever, a source of "power." This side
develops with the advance of material civilization, and culminates in the
modern inequalities of wealth.

5. Of theories of property we may distinguish (a) the Communistic,
which really attacks the whole principle of property ; (b) the Labour theory ;
(c) the Individualistic theory, which finds it essential to character ; and (d}
the Socialistic theory. Need of discrimination between property for " use "
and for " power," and of the extension of certain forms of State ownership
in the interest of personal rights.

I ••vsU'.'-J.j

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
OF PROPERTY, IN FACT AND IN IDEA.1

A satisfactory account of the development of property
in general has not yet been written, and perhaps
in the present state of our knowledge cannot be
written. In no department of the study of com-
parative institutions are the data more elusive and
unsatisfactory. The divergence between legal theory
and economic fact, between written law and popular
custom, between implied rights and actual enjoyment,
enables one and the same institution to be painted and,
within limits, quite honestly and faithfully painted in
very different colours. The legally minded historian
will lay stress on forms or principles which have very
little bearing on the actual life of the people. The
economic historian, impatient of these subtleties, will
ask us t'o look at the actual working of the institution,
only to find that by some turn of events the dormant
legal principle is awakened, and becomes a potent and
perhaps deadly force in the working of a system.
The theorist with a generalization to defend can always,
by judicious selection and omission, quote travellers,
ethnologists, early codes, or points of contemporary
custom on his side ; for he is singularly unfortunate

1 In this paper the social functions of property are examined by the standard of
purely humanitarian ethics.

4 PROPERTY i

if he cannot find something either in the every day
working of the institution or in its theoretical implica-
tions, which, by ignoring other aspects, may be made
to tell on his side. But any one who considers the
extraordinary difficulty which our own social historians
find 'in pteserttl&g ^a perfectly just picture of landed
property in England m any one century, to say nothing
of \ its\4^velQpJneyitVthr0ugh the centuries, will realize
'the kind 'of caution which science will demand in re-
constructing the true character of property among a
simple people who have no written documents from
the statements of travellers, even if they are skilled
observers.

A single illustration may suffice. In a simple
community practising extensive agriculture a man tells
a traveller that this is " his " land, and that his
neighbour's land. The statement is duly printed, and
in the end finds its way into a volume on the develop-
ment of property as evidence of the individual owner-
ship of land, without so much as a note to show the
reader whether there has been any enquiry into the
conditions of tenure. Another observer may state
with equal truth that the land " belongs " to the tribe,
and this remark figures in a work of different tendency
as equally good evidence in favour of primitive com-
munism, though there may be nothing to show in
what form the land is actually used by the members
of the tribe. In some of the Australian tribes good
observers tell us that there is no such thing as private
property in land.1 Among others, other writers assure
us that land neither belongs to a tribe nor to a group
of families but to a single male.2 Does the difference
really lie between the tribes or between the observers ?
Some light may be thrown on the question and on the

1 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 27, etc.

2 E.g. Grey and Eyre, cited in Hildebrand's Recht und Sitte auf den >ver-
schiedenen Kulturs(ufent p. 4.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 5

general difficulties of method by a passage in Mr.
Hewitt's classical work.1 Among the coast tribes of
New South Wales it appears that the land wherein a
child is born is " his " to hunt in, and even a father or
mother may thus " acquire " land when a child is born
to them outside their own locality. " The place where
a man is born," said an old man, " is his own locality
and he has always the right to hunt over it, and all
others born there have also the right to do so." It
may safely be said that this is one of the very last
forms of title that would occur to a civilized enquirer.
The effect of his examination of any single native
would be to persuade him that that native owned the
land where he was born. It would only be if he
happened to examine several born in the same district
that he would discover that many men called the same
land their own, and that their property in it could
neither be described as communal nor as individual.

Where data are so difficult to ascertain, generaliza-
tion must be unusually precarious. At best it may be
possible here to set out a few salient points which may
serve to throw light on the very diverse functions of
property in the social system, the variations which the
conception of property has undergone, and the manner
in which these are connected with the general develop-
ment of society. With this object we will briefly
consider (i) the general notion of property, (2) the
psychological conditions on which it rests, (3) certain
aspects of its social functions, (4) some of the forms
which property has assumed at several stages of social
development, and (5) the light thrown by these con-
siderations on certain typical theories of property which
will be briefly reviewed.

1 The Native Tribes of South East Australia, p. 8 3 .

6 PROPERTY i

i. THE NOTION OF PROPERTY

For purposes of social theory property is to be
conceived in terms of the control of man over things.
Man needs food to eat, implements to procure it, land
to work upon, and for that matter to stand and move
upon. That he may supply his needs at all, he must
at least temporarily control the implement that he is
using, and the spot on which he is working. But that
this temporary control or possession may become
property, certain further conditions are essential. His
possession must in the first place be recognized by
others, i.e. it must be of the nature of a right. In the
second place, with regard to things of a permanent
nature, his right must also have a certain permanence.
He must be able to count on the use of the thing.
His right over it, though it may be limited in time,
must not be confined to the moment when he has it in
his hands, but must be respected in his absence.
Thirdly, his control must be exclusive. If he shares
the control of the thing with others, then it is not his
private property. But if he and his partners control
it to the exclusion of the rest of the world, then it is
their joint or their common property. If on the other
hand all the world alike can use it, then it is not
property at all. Property may be private, joint, or
common, but it must vest in some person or persons,
and it must be exclusive of other persons.

Exclusive control, however, it must be borne in
mind, does not necessarily mean complete control.
A may control a thing for one purpose to the ex-
clusion of all the world, B among the rest ; yet B may
control that same thing for another purpose to the
exclusion of all the world, A among the rest. When
I take a room in an inn for the night, it is "mine"
for the night to the exclusion of any one else. But
the landlord has permanent rights in the room which

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 7

are exclusive as against me. It may be objected that
we ought to say that the landlord has the property,
while he gives me only the right of using it. This
may seem to accord better with usage, but in the final
analysis of property it seems desirable for several reasons
to insist that all forms of control are species of one
genus. The control over a thing may be complete or
partial, and the partial control may ascend by so many
gradations till it becomes complete, that it is difficult to
know where to draw a line. The only distinction of
principle seems to be that between control of a thing
for use and enjoyment, and control for the purpose of
disposal, sale, exchange, or bequest. The latter kind
of control may indeed be regarded as property in the
sense of eminent ownership, but to restrict property to
this sense would be to leave the manner of its use and
enjoyment out of account. A man may only be life-
tenant of a landed estate, its disposal after his death
being determined by law or the decision of the com-
munity, or a previous owner's will. Yet while he lives
the man may have complete control of its management,
and from generation to generation the same conditions
may recur. To leave the life interest out of account
would then be to divorce the conception of property
from the main conditions of practical control.

It will be seen then that property is a principle
which admits of variation in several distinct directions.
It is a control which may be more or less fully recog-
nized and guaranteed by society. It may be more or
less permanent, more or less dependent on present use
and possession or enjoyment. It may be concentrated
in one hand, or common to many. It may extend to
more, or to fewer, of the purposes to which a thing
may be put. But that the control may be property at
all, it must in some sort be recognized, in some sort
independent of immediate physical enjoyment, and at
some point exclusive of control by other persons.

8 PROPERTY i

Within these limits there is room for indefinite varia-
tion in many directions, and the variations are not
necessarily dependent on one another.

2. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROPERTY

These elementary considerations help us in deter-
mining the psychological basis of property, as to which
a mere note must here suffice. Some writers speak of
an instinct of property. But this is to simplify over-
much. No doubt the higher animals have a rudi-
mentary property. The bone which your dog has
once seized is u his " bone. He resents the attempt
to take it from him with an excitement which he does
not show in respect to a bone which he has not yet
taken. My tame jackdaw steals my pencil and makes
off hurriedly with it with all the flutter of conscious
theft, or he will play a game with it, dropping it pro-
vocatively and picking it up smartly, or going straight
at my ringers — the wretch ! — when I attempt to recapture
it. What happens in these cases seems to be that the
interest which a class of objects excites — either through
their use for food or, in the exceptional case of the
jackdaw, through their inherent attractiveness as nice,
bright, peckable things, easily portable in one's bill — is
focussed by the first act of seizure or even of attention
on a particular object, and that thereupon all the train
of feelings or reactions attendant on, or subsidiary to,
its use are called forth in response to that object rather
than others. This constitutes the mental appropriation
of an object ; and not only for man, but for the dog
with its buried bone, and the bird with its nest, and
the jackdaw with its "cache," the appropriated object
becomes a permanent basis of action, something that it
can count upon and go back to at need. For man, at
all events, his property is above all something that he
can rely upon as a permanent home, permanent means

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 9

of subsistence or enjoyment. Property is thus an
integral element in an ordered life of purposeful
activity. It is, at bottom for the same reason, an integral
element in a free life. This distinguishes property
from mere adequate provision with material goods.
A man who has his meals set down before him all
nicely prepared and measured out by expert authority
may be well nourished ; but as he has no property
beyond his actual plateful, so he has no freedom but
to take it or give it to the cat. The man who has a
shilling in his pocket is free to eat or drink what he
likes up to the limit of the shilling. He may not
get so good or sustaining a meal, but he gets his own
choice. The man who has a weekly wage is, other
things being equal, more free than a man paid by
truck, and a man who works on his own land with his
own implements is more free, other things being equal,
than the wage-earner. At each point the more a man
can count on his own exertions applied to his own
property, the more he can direct his own activity on
the lines which suit his taste. Some measure of pro-
perty appears, in short, to be the essential basis of
liberty ; and conversely the sense of freedom in enjoy-
ment ranks along with the sense of security and per-
manence among the complex constituents of the pride
and joy of ownership.

3. SOCIAL ASPECTS OF PROPERTY : USE AND POWER

Unfortunately what is liberty for one man is often
the negation of liberty for another. In a developed
society a man's property is not merely something which
he controls and enjoys, which he can make the basis of
his labour and the scene of his ordered activities, but
something whereby he can control another man and
make it the basis of that man's labour and the scene of
activities ordered by himself. The abstract right of

io PROPERTY i

property is apt to ignore these trifling distinctions ; and
theories of property are founded, for example on the
right of the labourer to his produce, which completely
ignore the fact that as industry develops, the most con-
spicuous function of property is to secure a part of
one man's labour-product for the benefit of another.
Both the history and the philosophy of property turn
on these two relations of the institution to social life as
a whole. On the one hand property is the material
basis of a permanent, ordered, purposeful, and self-
directed activity. Such upon the whole is the property
which a man directly uses or enjoys by himself or in
association with his nearest and dearest. On the other
hand property is a form of social organization, whereby
the labour of those who have it not is directed by and
for the enjoyment of those that have. In this sense
the control of the owner is essentially a control of labour.
It is that " alchemy " whereby the " Seigneur lounging
in the CEil de Boeuf " extracts the third nettle from
the gatherer in the fields and calls it rent. It does
not essentially consist in the handling and use of the
material thing. It is consistent with as little knowledge
of the thing as the average shareholder of an Argen-
tine railway possesses of the whereabouts of " his "
track, who knows that the dividends come in with fair
regularity every six months, though he might have
difficulty in locating the terminus of the line within
500 miles.

Now these two functions of property, the control of
things, which gives freedom and security, and the control
of persons through things, which gives power to the
owner, are very different. In some respects they are
radically opposed, yet from the nature of the case they
are intertwined, and their relationship can be traced
through the history of the institution, some phases of
which may now be indicated.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY n

4. PHASES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROPERTY

In the general sense here given property is found
in every known society. A man's clothing, weapons,
and tools, a woman's ornaments, the family hut or
cave, or at least a marked portion thereof,1 are from
the first recognized as belonging to the man, the woman,
or the family. The inventory of a Vedda's very simple
personal estate is given by Dr. and Mrs. Seligmann :

One axe, bow and arrows, three pots, a deer skin, a flint
and steel, and supply of tinder, a gourd for carrying water, a
betel pouch containing betel covers, and some form of box for
holding lime, also a certain amount of cloth besides that on
the person.

To these personal belongings a man has a right in
the sense in which rights are recognized by simple
societies. Theft would at lowest be resented by the
individual, and there would be a customary form of
reparation which he would exact. As soon as any sort
of public court is formed it will deal with this right
and the wrongs arising out of it, on the same general
principles and by the same methods as with others.2
To discuss these questions further would be to examine
the social basis of rights in general, which is foreign to
our purpose. Property is from the first, to all appear-
ances, a right recognized much in the same fashion as
rights of the person or marital rights are recognized,
and on this side the development follows the same
general lines in all cases. The important point for us

1 E.g. In the " Long House " of the Iroquois and other North American Indians.
Dargun, " Ursprung und Geschichte des Eigentums " (Z. f. -vergleichende Rechts-
lumemchaft, Bd. v. p. 37), insists on this point. The Vedda families, according to
Dr. Seligmann, have their proper place in the joint caves.

2 In nine cases out of ten the "thievishness" attributed by travellers to simple
peoples is seen on careful reading to mean that they disregarded the proprietary rights
of the whites. Could these peoples describe the morals of the whites, what might
they say of the civilized man's regard for their property? It is true that in some
cases belongings are taken without leave and without censure, but these are certainly
the exception.

12 PROPERTY i

to consider is what sort of things are objects of pro-
perty, and whose property they are ; or in more ultimate
analysis, What sort of exclusive control is exerted over
things, and by whom ?

Now among the simplest known tribes, who live
by gathering fruits, digging roots, and hunting, the
possible objects of property may be divided into two
categories. On the one hand there are the trivial per-
sonal belongings that have been mentioned. On the
other hand there is the land, uncleared and uncultivated,
but the one great means of subsistence. Of the first
kind there is private ownership ; but it will be apparent
that the life of the little society will be determined
principally by liberty or restriction in the matter of
hunting or collecting food, that is to say, by the owner-
ship of the land. How then is land owned in these
communities ? Is it communal or is it personal ? If
we could answer this question clearly and unambigu-
ously, we should get as near as the evidence is ever
likely to bring us to a solution of the problem of
primitive property, and in particular of the vexed
questions surrounding the nature of the village com-
munity. Unfortunately the evidence is not altogether
clear and unambiguous. In some instances the com-
munal tenure of the land is beyond doubt. The case
of the Central Australians already quoted may serve as
an instance. In the first place, among these people the
tribe has its known area, with boundaries recognized
by the neighbouring tribes. Within the tribe there
are divisions and subdivisions, the ultimate unit being
a " local group " of a few families — in one tribe forty
individuals constitute the largest existing group — who
roam about an area which, like that of the tribe as a
whole, is clearly defined. Within this area there is no
individual property. It is free to all members of the
group, but no one else may hunt in it without per-
mission, and the boundaries are habitually observed.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 13

Moreover, ownership is associated with the centres
within the area in which the souls of ancestors who
lived in the Alcheringa — the great long ago — are de-
posited, which souls are reincarnated in living members
of the group. Within the terms of our definition it is
clear that this area is the common property of the group.
Writers who deny communal property altogether among
the hunting peoples can only deal with a case like this
by calling it not property but sovereignty. It is true
that the group is substantially an autonomous unit, but
the only deduction that can be drawn from this is that
political control — if we may use such an expression
here — and the right of property are not at this stage
differentiated. Indeed, in the case of land this
differentiation is not completely effected till a relatively
late stage in social development, and it may be doubted
whether a complete differentiation is ever possible
without socially disastrous consequences. In any case
the effective control of the land is in the hands of the
group. No single member has an exclusive right
against the group, while the group has an exclusive
right against all others, and this right is recognized by
the others. We cannot refuse to call this common
ownership ; and if the same system obtained among all
hunting people, the starting-point in the development
of property in land would be perfectly clear.

But this is not the case. The necessities of hunting
and the collection of food may lead to further sub-
division, and we find cases, both in Australia and else-
where, where land is owned by an individual hunter
and his family.1 We saw above that some ambiguity

1 In ten Australian tribes or groups common ownership is pretty clearly
indicated, and in five family ownership. But several authors, e.g. Lang, Grey, Eyre,
Curr, assert individual ownership. The evidence, however, is often conflicting and
in some cases we can only suppose a kind of dual ownership. Thus J. Browne,
writing in Dr. Petermann's Mitteilungen for 1856, describes four West Australian
tribes which he knew well, as having land possessed by families and individuals j
but he remarks that it is difficult to say in what private property consists, as the
tribe roams the whole area without distinction, while if a stranger trespasses, it

i4 PROPERTY i

may attach to the evidence in these cases. Let us
take an instance where the report is precise. The
Veddas are organized in very small groups of families
closely related to one another. Each group has its
definite hunting area, but within it each man has his
own land. This land passes by regular inheritance, or
may be given to a son or a son-in-law. It may also be
alienated. But whether it is given to the natural heir
or to any one else it can only be with the assent of
every adult male of the group.1 In this instance it
is clear that immediate ownership is private, and that
the eminent ownership is in the group. The control
of the group secures the important point, that access to
the land will be maintained for those who are by birth
its members. As long as this principle is maintained
land may be communal property, or it may be personal,
or the two principles may be intermixed, but in any
case it will be held for use and not for power. Its
tenure will be occupational, and I think we may pro-
visionally conclude that this is the general characteristic
of primitive property in land, that is to say, of the one
essential basis of production in the lowest stages of
development.2

is resented and a fight ensues. Perhaps the only prerogative of the owner, he says, is
to take the lead in this resistance. As to family property, it must be borne in mind
that the Australian local group is often so small as to be little more than an enlarged
family, so that family and group ownership pass into one another. It should also be
noted that rules for the division of the spoils of the hunt are common in Australia.
Of twenty cases of which I have information, the food is divided between the whole
camp in ten ; between the relations, including the wife's relations, in six ; while in
four the rules are not specified.

1 Seligmann, op. cit. pp. 107, in.

2 Among fifty-five tribes of "hunters and gatherers " as to whose property system
I have found some account, forty-four appears to hold land either as property of the
tribe or of a smaller group — clan, village, or band — within the tribe. Of the remainder
five are the Australian tribes in which ownership is attributed to the family, and
there are left six cases of individual ownership, to which perhaps a few more
Australian cases ought to be added. In two or three instances ownership is
attributed to the chief, but this seems to be rather as the representative of the
community than as true personal property.

In a few cases special clans monopolized the land or the best part of it. Thus
among the Thlinkeets, according to Swanton (Smithsonian Annual Reports, xxvi),
certain clans had no land of their own, and either used the common land of the

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 15

This suggestion is confirmed when we consider the
beginning of agriculture. Land at the outset is cleared
for the raising of a crop. Its fertility is soon exhausted,
perhaps after a single harvest, and the little community
moves on to another spot. But the whole amount
brought under cultivation at any one time is a very
small fraction of the waste belonging to the com-
munity and hunted over by any of its members in-
discriminately. No difficulty is made about the right
to clear a field, but whatever one man has cleared
belongs, at least while he tills it, to himself and his
family. At this stage private property can hardly be
more than a possessory right, for when the last crop
has been taken the clearing is really of less value than
the waste. " Arva per annos mutant et superest ager."
There is uncleared land in abundance. It belongs to
the community and is open to any one to break up.1
Thus there is temporary private possession and per-
manent common ownership. But on this point more

tribe or had to wait until the more fortunate clans had done with their land for the
season. Among the Chilcotin, Carriers, and Western Shushwaps land was the
property of the nobles. In the two former cases, according to Father Morice
(Proceedings of the Canadian Institute, 1893), the heads of non-noble families
might hunt on the land with the chief's permission. In the latter, according to Teit
(Report of the Jesup Expedition), the nobles charged rents on the commons, fined
them for trespass, and drove them off to the more distant tribal grounds quite in the
style of modern civilization. Among the Tsimshian, according to Boas, a clan
retained the right to its land even though it moved away $ but I do not know whether
it could charge anything for its use by others. All these instances are from the
relatively developed hunting and fishing tribes of the west coast of North America,
where class distinctions had come into being.

In the Torres Straits land may be held in individual ownership and is not infre-
quently lent or let for a share in the produce, e.g. a garden is lent on the under-
standing that the first-fruits go to the owner (Haddon, Cambridge Expedition, vol.
iv.). One group of these islands is non-agricultural, and private property also
obtains here, but whether the leasing system is also known is not clear to me.

The figures given above are from an enquiry which is not quite finished and needs
final revision, but are not likely to require any such modification as would invalidate
the general rule that, with a few exceptions such as those mentioned, land in a
community of hunters and gatherers is accessible to all members of a social group.
This, it may be remarked, would hold even in the Australian cases where ownership is
assigned to the individual. There is nowhere any hint of a landless class.

1 Compare the remarks of Von Martius, Zur Ethnographic Amerikas, on
Brazilian land tenure, which are sufficiently clear, notwithstanding the criticisms of
Dargun (Entiuicklungs-Geschichte, pp. 51-54).

1 6 PROPERTY i

than one possibility arises. Agriculture may become a
collective industry, fields being tilled and the harvest
gathered by the common labour, as among the
Karaya tribes,1 and a special store may be set apart for
the necessitous, as among the Creeks. But more often,
as tillage develops and becomes more intensive, the
temporary occupation becomes permanent. The neces-
sity of letting the land lie fallow may be met by a
two-field or three-field system, and the recurrent
possession of the same plots hardens into permanent
ownership. The holding, however, may still be that of
the family or of the kindred rather than that of the
individual ; and the kindred, living together in a Long
House with stores in common, constitute a smaller and
stricter communism within the community as a whole.2
But whether through the break-up of the kindred or
as the direct result of the growth of cultivation,3 land
may be recognized as the private property of the man
who clears or tills it, and may be alienated, sold,, or
bequeathed.4 Immediate ownership of the cultivated
plots thus passes to the kindred, the family, or the
individual. Still the community may retain certain
eminent rights and certain powers of control : for
example, alienation to an outsider may be forbidden, or
allowed only by common consent of the original group,5

1 Ehrenreich, Veroff. KSnigl. Museums, Band i.

2 The Iroquois lived in joint houses containing from five to twenty families and
made common store of the food, which was duly distributed among the component
families by the superintending matron. The Creeks lived in clustered houses,
practising a similar communism (Morgan, Houses and House Life, etc., pp. 64-68).

3 The evidence does not justify us in laying down a fixed order leading from the
community through the kin to the individual. It is more likely that development
followed a different course among different people.

4 Thus, among the Kayans of Borneo, according to Niewenhuis (^uer durch
Borneo), unbroken land is accessible to any one, but land once tilled passes into
private ownership and may be let or exchanged. Among the Hill Dyaks,
accor ing to Ling Roth (Natives of Sarawak), land is abundant within the tribal
limits, but very little is individual property, except the private plots near the houses,
which are saleable. The locality of the farms is generally settled by the council
of the tribe, so that one road may serve all. Among the Sea Dyaks a man acquires
a title to the land by clearing it.

5 So in early mediaeval Germany, Schroder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rcchts-
jreschichte, pp. 307-8,

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 17

while the right to acquire new land by clearing requires
a more definite assent from the community or chief
as it becomes more valuable.

Again, the community may retain a general control
of cultivation, and may remain the guardian and ultimate
court of appeal on questions of the rights and duties
of its members, and on all customs regulating the
common life. On this side, the old principle survived
into the manorial courts of our mediaeval system.
Furthermore, the cultivation of the arable is not self-
sufficient. As agriculture develops it requires beasts
of burden, and a right of grazing on the common
pasture and the use of the waste are essential to the
maintenance of the tillage. But the pasture and the
waste remain common ; and if there is meadow land,
its use is duly apportioned by the community in
accordance with the needs of each holding. Lastly, if
holdings become unequal and unsuited to the needs
of families, there may be a conscious effort to maintain
the partnership by a system of periodical redistribution,
as in the case of the Russian mir.

Systems like these, though compatible with a
considerable development of individual ownership, are
still so far primitive that they associate property, not
with power, but with use.1 At least until property
begins to press on the means of subsistence, every
boy on growing to manhood will have the basis of his
life-economy secured to him by the social structure.
He will succeed to his share in the family land, with
the right to pasture, meadow'and waste, which it carries
with it ; and if, through the growth of the family, the
lot has become too narrow, he will readily gain
the consent of the community to an additional clearing
in the waste. If the pressure of population has begun,

1 In more than one hundred descriptions of land tenure among agricultural and
pastoral peoples of simple culture, I have only found ten cases in which a system of
letting or leasing land is suggested.

C

i 8 PROPERTY i

it is more likely to lead to trouble with neighbouring
peoples than with landlessness and poverty at home.
Its effects will be seen in tribal unrest, migrations, and
wars of conquest. Here then is one possible root of
disorganization. But there are others. Men are by
nature unequal, and one family will thrive while
another decays. If debt - slavery — particularly for
non-payment of the wergild — is recognized, men will
fall into the hands of creditors for whose benefit in
future they may have to till the land, and prisoners of
war may be put to the same use.1 Whole tribes,
indeed, may become tributary to a stronger people.2
Within the community the growth of military organiza-
tion involves the elevation of the chief and his trusted
followers into a nobility standing above the mass of
the free men, and this elevation implies at some point
or another a corresponding depression. Some one must
serve, if some one else is to have leisure to be a noble-
man.

But apart from these tendencies, there is another
economic movement on which we have not yet touched.
In some regions of the world, particularly on the
steppes of Eastern Europe and Asia, the pasture land
provides opportunity for a different form of develop-
ment from the hunting stage. The possession of
flocks and herds is far more free from communal
restrictions than the tilling of the soil ; and even
if the herds are family property, the power of the
father among these peoples is often so great that he
deserves to be called the true owner. But what is
more important, property in flocks and herds can wax
and wane with ease and celerity ; and in pastoral
societies accordingly, the distinction of rich and poor
readily makes its appearance. Some pastoral tribes

1 For serfs of this type among the Germans, see Tacitus, Germania, 25, Schroder,
of. cit. pp. 46, 47.

2 Even a tribe of hunters like the South American Mbaya hold the neighbouring
Guanas in a form of serfdom, compelling them to till land for them.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 19

indeed are slaveholding. In others the poorer members
of the community sufficiently supply the need.1 The
definite appearance of the man who is neither
provided for as a slave, nor by his own hereditary
share in the common basis of subsistence, seems to be
especially associated with the pastoral stage, and in
agricultural societies to be at least largely influenced
by the pastoral element. It was in the end the en-
closure of the pasture and the waste which destroyed
the remains of the common field system in this country
and achieved the ruin of the small holder.2

This slight sketch may serve to show the general
character of the economy from which the mediaeval
organization of Western Europe was evolved. The
whole problem of the antecedents of the manor is
still entangled in endless controversy ; but a survey
of the anthropological data on the whole confirms the
view that at the back of the entire process we must
place "a village community of shareholders which
cultivated the land on the open field system and treated
all other requisites of rural life as appendant to it." 3
The only question is as to the extent to which within
this community private property was developed or
eminent control maintained. In any case it is probable
that land was originally held for use, and that its
value to its separate owner was conditioned by the
right which it carried to that part of the area which
was undeniably common. But we have seen that
from the first this system was compatible with in-
equality, and we have noted several methods by which
the inequality might develop. In our own country
in the early Middle Ages the growth of the king's

1 Or there may be a subject tribe who are hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Cf. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System, who finds ten clear cases of the presence
and twelve of the absence of slavery among pastoral folk (p. 262 ff.).

2 See Tawney, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century j and Hammond, The
Village Labourer.

3 Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 365.

20 PROPERTY i

power, and then the grant of judicial privileges and
correlative fiscal duties to private people, together
with corresponding grants to the Church, were con-
tinuously at work to convert the village into the
manor.1 Now in the manor the cultivators had
certainly to work for the lord as well as for themselves.
The lord's property is held " for power," or perhaps
more strictly it is the economic appanage of the legal
power which he holds over the inhabitants — it is
power held for property. At the same time one good
feature of the older system survives. The ordinary
child is still born into a system in which the basis of
his work and his livelihood is assured to him. He
has his virgate or half virgate. At worst — if not a
slave 2 — he is a cottar with a few acres and the right by
practice, if not by stringent custom, to the pasture and
the waste. Unfortunately these rights were insecure,
and when the strain came, when it became profitable
to lay down pasture, to enclose the demesne, and to
encroach on the waste, there was no one but the free-
holder who was in a firm position for resistance.3 In
the break-up of the manorial system the serf gained his
freedom, but he lost his land. The outline of the
story has now been pretty clearly made out, but is
too long and complex even for summary here.4 With
the upshot we are familiar — on the one hand
private ownership denuded of the old public obliga-
tions ; on the other, a landless proletariate whose
chief economic privilege is that its members are free
to leave their homes and do better elsewhere ; and
between them the farmer owning his stock but renting
his land.

The appearance of the capitalist farmer is, however,

1 Cf. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond.

2 Chattel slavery disappeared in England during the twelfth century.

3 On the position of the copyholders and the customary tenants, see Tawney.

4 See the works already cited of Mr. Tawney and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond j
also The English Peasantry and the Enclosures, by Gilbert Slater.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 21

only a minor symptom of a vast change in the nature
of property which has developed pan passu with the
private ownership of land on the large scale. In
early society we could virtually treat land as the one
necessary basis of subsistence ; and the fact that land
could not be accumulated in private hands apart from
personal occupation was noted as a preservative of the
common life. In the pastoral stage, however, we saw
accumulation of a different kind, and the growth of
flocks and herds, the first form of true capital, at once
involved the distinction between the possessing and
non-possessing classes. The development of industry
and commerce has always engendered the same
distinction, and has set a problem to legislators whether
in Athens or in Rome or in our own time. But as
industry is more productive, so accumulation proceeds
on a vastly greater scale in our own civilization ; and
while the borders of political, religious, national, and
one may say social, freedom have widened, the
inequalities of wealth have only increased. Yet it is
not inequality as such that is the fundamental fact of
our system. It is the entire dependence of the masses
on land and capital which belong to others. Five out
of six, I suppose, of the children now born, are born to
no assured place in the industrial system. They have
of their own no means of subsistence. They have
hands and brains, but they have neither land to till nor
stock to till it with. What is more, only a fraction of
our population could be supported by agriculture ;
and for the cotton spinner, the railway man, or the
coal miner, there is no sense in talking of his owning
the means of production as an individual. The rise of
large-scale industry has abolished the possibility of any
form of individualism as a general solution of the
economic problem.

Thus, while modern economic conditions have
virtually abolished property for use — apart from

22 PROPERTY i

furniture, clothing, etc. ; that is, property in the means
of production, for the great majority of the people —
they have brought about the accumulation of vast
masses of property for power in the hands of a
relatively narrow class. The contrast is accentuated
by the increasing divorce between power and use.
The large landowner stood in some direct governing
relation to his estate. Responsibility went with
ownership, and even survived the explicit association
between land tenure and political functions. The
capitalist employer, who began to be differentiated
from the workman in the earlier part of the modern
period, and who was the prominent feature of the first
two generations of the industrial revolution, was still,
as the name implies, the employer as well as the
capitalist. He himself, that is to say, was actively
engaged in carrying out the function which his
property made possible. But with the progress of
accumulation there came further differentiations. It
became more and more indisputable that the possession
of capital was one thing and the conduct of business
another ; and with the rise of the joint-stock system
capital became so split up into shares and stocks that it
has come to be for its owners nothing more than a
paper certificate, or an entry in the books of the Bank
of England, which they have never seen, meaning to
them only what it brings in by the quarter or the half
year. And yet these investments, this capital, is the
governing force in the lives of thousands and millions
of men scattered throughout the world. It is the
instrument by which they are set in motion, by which
their labour is sustained, above all, by which it is
directed and controlled. The divorce of functions is
complete ; and what wonder if the owner of capital
presents himself to the imagination of the workman
merely as an abstract, distant, unknown suction-pump,
that is drawing away such and such a percentage of the

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 23

fruits of industry without making a motion to help in
the work ?

Lastly, behind the mass of the investors, is the
financier who shuffles all these abstract pieces of capital
about, controls their application, takes his commission
on the proceeds, and constitutes himself the working
centre of industry and commerce. The institution of
property has, in its modern form, reached its zenith
as a means of giving to the few power over the life of
the many, and its nadir as a means of securing to
the many the basis of regular industry, purposeful
occupation, freedom, and self-support.

5. SOME THEORIES OF PROPERTY

With these few illustrations of the diversity of
forms which the institution of property has assumed
in the course of social evolution, we may usefully
compare some distinctive theories which have been
held by thinkers of its basis and functions. We may
consider first those who have attacked the institution
of private property altogether, in the interests of
communism ; secondly, those who have found a
general justification for the institution of private
property either in its economic or in its ethical value ;
and thirdly, those who have held that the solution lies
in the discrimination of kinds of property and the
function which each severally performs.

(a) Property has sometimes been attacked on
philosophical, sometimes on religious grounds. In the
Republic , the object of Plato is to set out in clearest
possible outline the picture of a completely unified
State. The State is to be so compact a unity that, if
one of its members suffers, it is to feel that it suffers
in that member, just as when the finger aches the man
feels the ache in the finger. Looking over the rallying
points at which the individual can assert himself

24 PROPERTY i

against the social unity, Plato finds them conspicuously
in family life on the one hand and in property on the
other, and he proceeds to the abolition of both ; at any
rate, the guardians, who are to lead the highest, the
most completely social, and the most fully philosophic
life, can have no room in their minds either for family
or for economic cares. Communism is advocated in
the interests, not of enjoyment but of austerity ; and
in this the Platonic philosophers may be regarded as
prototypes of the monastic community. In both cases
it is open to criticism to maintain that social unity is
pushed to a point at which personality is obliterated,
and that the independence of material things is
expressed in a form in which it defeats itself. Man
cannot live without material things, and in so far as he
is dependent for his necessaries on the will of others,
his life is also dependent upon these others. Where
he cannot move hand or foot without them, he abandons
self-direction, and the self-denial, which was to give
spiritual freedom, ends by denying autonomy altogether.

But the principle of property was also criticized in
antiquity from the point of view of Natural Law.
Property, it was clear to the thinkers who introduced
this conception into ethics, was a human institution.
The gifts of nature, the land and its fruits, must
originally be free to all men ; appropriation was the act
of man, and the institutions by which appropriation is
regulated derived from man-made laws. Just as by
nature all men are free and equal, so by nature they
have a right to use the earth and its fruits for their
own purposes, to apply their labour to them freely,
and to enjoy the product at their will.

This conception of a natural Communism underlying
the institutions of positive law was taken up by the
Early Church, where it fused with the conception of a
Christian Communism, based, not on the Platonic
principle of an abstract unity, but on the ideal of

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 25

brotherly love and mutual aid as between co-religionists,
the sons of one Father, the members of one house-
hold. This was an ideal which could only be effective
among the members of a small community ; and when
the Church had seriously to undertake the problem of
reconciling State law with Christian ethics, it had to fall
back on the Stoic distinction between the law of nature
and the positive institutions of government. The
fabric of society was accepted, and though Communism
is proclaimed as the law of nature at the outset of the
Canon law, it is not so interpreted as to direct or
to qualify those institutions of State which determine
the conditions on which property is held, and by which
wealth is distributed, excepting in so far as it secures
the levy of a tax on wealth for the service of the
Church and of the poor. The theory of Communism,
as qualified by respect for established institutions,
becomes a doctrine of charity.

In point of fact, as a political doctrine, Communism
is an emotion rather than a system. In a small
community it has its place. Every family, while the
members live together, is in essence a communistic
unit ; and Communism may be conceived as operating
successfully among any small group of enthusiasts as
long as the enthusiasm is maintained. In the larger
world the communal principle has its place only in
respect of the enjoyment of those things in which no
correlative performance of duty is requisite. Public
spaces, recreation grounds, the advantages of lighting,
and, in some respects, of cleaning, sanitation, order
and good government, are common property in the
strict sense of the term. Everybody can enjoy them
without payment, for some of them are things which
cannot exist at all unless they are available for every
one, and others cost no more when available to all than
they would if restricted to a few. But Communism of
this kind only touches the outside of life.

26 PROPERTY i

(£) For the regular working of the economic order
it has been clear to most thinkers that there must be
some systematic apportionment of the instruments of
production, and the fruits of industry. The social
organism has many functions, and each function
requires its due stimulus and sustenance ; hence the
most popular theory of property associates it with the
right to labour and the product of labour. On this
basis Locke finds a justification for property antecedent
to positive law. By the law of nature the earth stood
open to all men, but also by the law of nature a man
had the right of property in his own person, and in
that which he wrought with his hands. Accordingly,
that in which he " mixed his labour " became his own,
and this would include the portion of soil which he
reclaimed by occupation and tillage. But in this con-
ception, as Locke apparently recognizes, property is
limited by use : " As much as any one can make use
of to any advantage of life until it spoils, so much he
may by his labour fix, and property in whatever is
beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to
others." Hence Locke protests that his theory is
incompatible with " engrossing." Unfortunately he
only works it out for " Americans," as typical instances
of people who live under conditions where land is
still superabundant. And when he comes to consider
property as an established institution of organized
society, he can only tell us what is painfully obvious,
that " it is plain that the consent of men have agreed
to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the
earth — I mean out of the bounds of society and
compact, for in governments the laws regulate it, they
having by consent found out and agreed in a way how
a man may rightfully, and without injury, possess
more than he himself can make use of, by receiving
gold and silver."

1 Second Treatise on Civil Government, chap. v.

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 27

Locke, it is true, states in general terms that laws
and government ought to accommodate themselves to
the principles of natural law ; and if we press this
principle in the case of property, it seems clear that
Locke might be led, if he were living now, to some-
what radical conclusions. Be this as it may, we find
in Locke the basis of a view which is at once a
justification of property, and a criticism of industrial
organization. Man has a right, it would seem, first
to the opportunity of labour ; secondly, to the fruits
of his labour ; thirdly, to what he can use of these
fruits, and nothing more. Property so conceived is
what we have here called property for use. The
conception is individualistic, but it may be given a
more social turn if we bear in mind, first of all, that
society as a collective whole is that which determines
the structure and working of economic institutions ;
and secondly, that in a society where men produce
for exchange, labour is a social function, and the price
of labour its reward. Locke's doctrine would then
amount to this, that the social right of each man is
to a place in the economic order, in which he both has
opportunity for exercising his faculties in the social
service, and can reap thereby a reward proportionate
to the value of the service rendered to society.1

(c) But there exists a much more radical Individual-
ism than Locke's, which also ascends to antiquity.
The Aristotelian criticism of Plato proceeds partly
from the just conception that unity is only one feature
of social life, and that the true community must be
a whole of many diverse parts. It rests also upon
the conception that property is among the external
good things which are necessary to the full expression
of personality. In emphasising this side of the matter 2

1 For some further account of Locke's doctrine and criticism of it see Essay II.,
in which also will be found a fuller account of Aristotle's theory of property than
is needful for the purpose of the next paragraph.

2 Ibid.

28 PROPERTY i

it may be allowed that Aristotle lets the communal
principle evaporate into a mere pious aspiration.
Private possession and common use is a pleasant phrase,
but, we may safely maintain, remains a mere phrase.
It is no organic law for society to lay down, that men
should use their possessions in the spirit of the proverb
that " the things of friends are common."

The centre of this line of thought is the conception
that property is an instrument of personality, and in
that form it has been revived and has played an
important part in modern thought. In general terms,
what has been said at the outset will have justified
this principle by anticipation. Material things that
a man can count upon as his own, that he can leave
and return to, that he can use at his will, are, we have
admitted, the basis of a purposeful life, and therefore
of a rational and harmonious development of personality.
But as a basis of the institution of property this
principle carries with it consequences which seem too
often to be overlooked. On the one hand it carries
the condemnation of a social system in which property
of the kind and amount required for such development
of personality is not generally accessible to all citizens,
who do not forfeit their right by misfeasance. A
society which should accept this principle, could not
tolerate anything like the existing distribution of wealth,
could not permit those methods of accumulation which
concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and leave
the many — so far as the practical object of earning
their living is concerned — as naked as they were born.
Cherished as a Conservative principle, it has in it the
seed of Radical revolution. And secondly, if this
principle would require the universal distribution of
the means of subsistence, it would also limit the
accumulation of property by the measure of that which
is healthy for the soul. The possession of property
which emancipates from toil, the possession of property

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 29

which makes, not for the guidance of self, but for the
control of others, stands on this principle condemned ;
and what is a justification of property becomes a
reprobation of riches. Ethical individualism in property,
carried through, blows up its own citadel.

(d*) There remains the Socialistic conception of
property, the term by which in general we may express
any theory which distinguishes between the appropria-
tion of the means of production and the appropriation
of the fruits of labour. The difficulty of this theory,
considered merely as a theory — for we are not here
concerned with practical applications — is, in the first
place, to discriminate neatly between the two kinds of
property ; and in the second place, to determine the
conditions of access for the individual to the means of
production, and the ethical basis and measure of his
reward. But at the outset let us be clear as to the
distinction between the Socialistic principle and the
Communist. To the Communist all things are equally
the objects of enjoyment, without payment made or
service rendered. To the Socialist — or indeed to any
society so far as the socialistic principle is applied —
property is not common to all, but is held in common
for all, and its assignment or apportionment is a matter
of collective regulation. There is no enjoyment with-
out a correlative performance of function. The problem
before the Socialist has always been to consider how this
collective regulation can be accommodated to the free
initiative and enterprise of the individual ; and it may
be doubted whether, upon purely socialistic principles,
this problem is capable of solution.

The problem is complicated by the psychological
difficulties of democratic organization. We talk easily
of a common property, of a common industry directed
to the common good and organized by the general will ;
but where is the general will ? Is it a figment of the
rhetoricians, or is it a working reality in actual life ?

30 PROPERTY i

In practice, does it mean a collective decision, to which
the ordinary man contributes, and in which therefore
his personality may, in a genuine sense, be said to be
expressed ? Or does it mean the fiat of statesmen and
of experts, sheepishly accepted by the crowd because
they see no way of escaping it ? On the former alter-
native, collective property might truly be regarded as
having that same organic relation to personality as is
possessed by the peasant's plot of ground in relation to
the proprietor, who knows the capacity of every square
yard of it. In the latter alternative, collective industry
becomes a mechanism, in which each man might be
reduced to the part of an unthinking cog, grinding his
grind with no more freedom than the factory hand
under the capitalist employer, and with no more sense
of the social value of his work than the machine-minder
performing a fragmentary process in the manufacture
of an article, which, whether sound or unsound, whole-
some or unwholesome, will go to the use or the
annoyance or the injury of people whom he has never
seen and never will see. Considerations such as these
have led some of the more generous minds of our own
time to look for the reform of property rather in a
revived individualism than in furthering the collectivist
tendencies, which, of late years, have influenced legisla-
tion. Their ideal would be something like the
mediaeval organization, without its restrictions on
personal freedom. They sigh for the day of the small
landed proprietor and the master-workman.

In relation to the land this conception, no doubt,
has a certain limited applicability ; but in the main its
development seems barred by the hard facts of economic
development, making for the large scale of production
and the complex interchange of goods throughout the
world market. Yet the principle is in so far just that
it recognizes an indestructible core of value in the idea
of property. Only it has to be maintained that, if

i THE EVOLUTION OF PROPERTY 31

private property is of value, for reasons and within
limits that have been indicated, to the fulfilment of
personality, common property is equally of value for
the expression and the development of social life. The
problem of modern economic reorganization would
seem to be to find a method, compatible with the
industrial conditions of the new age, of securing to each
man, as a part of his civic birthright, a place in the
industrial system and a lien upon the common product
that he may call his own, without dependence either
upon private charity or the arbitrary decision of an
official.

The other side of this problem is that of securing
for the State the ultimate ownership of the natural
sources of wealth and of the accumulation of past
generations, together with the supreme control of the
direction of industrial activity and of labour contracts.
We cannot reconstitute the early commune. We cannot
secure for each man his inheritance, his virgate, and his
plough team. What we have to aim at would seem to
be an analogous relation between the individual and the
community, adapted to the complexity of modern
conditions, combining the security of the old regime
with the flexibility and freedom of the new, partly by
education and training, partly by the supervision of
industrial organization. We have to restore the con-
tact between the individual and the instruments of
labour. We have to assure him of continuity in
employment, and — given reasonable industry and thrift
— of provision against the accidents of life and the
periods of helplessness. And for these purposes we
have to restore to society a direct ownership of some
things, but an eminent ownership of all things material
to the production of wealth, securing " property for
use " to the individual, and retaining " property for
power " for the democratic state.

II

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
OF PROPERTY

BY

THE REV. HASTINGS RASHDALL, D.Lrrr., F.B.A.

FELLOW AND LECTURER IN PHILOSOPHY, NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
CANON OF HEREFORD

SUMMARY

THE Platonic Utopia has little bearing on modern controversies. Aristotle
understood the advantages of private property, but was not an extreme
Individualist. Defects of his treatment due to (a] his not appreciating the
functions of Capital, (b) not seeing that his condemnation of Usury would
apply to the land-owner. His argument (against Plato) for private property
contains in germ the best that has ever been said on the subject. But his
views presuppose an aristocratic class-morality.

Stoicism and Christianity both contributed to a more universalistic and
humanitarian morality. Views of the Fathers, Canonists, and Jurists. The
legal idea that property can be acquired by occupatio passes into an ethical
justification of property.

Locke's attempt to base property upon natural law by assuming that a
man has a natural right to his own labour and to everything (including
land) with which he mixes his labour. Difficulties and inconsistencies of
the theory, which contradicts itself, since its application would violate the
natural right of the landless man to his labour. This seen by Karl Marx
and the a priori Socialists, who made the same principle the basis of extreme
Socialism, i.e. the principle that a man is entitled to the whole produce of
his labour. The theory cannot be applied in practice.

Impossible to settle the question by any a priori theory. Duties and
rights cannot be ascertained without an appeal to social consequences. This
recognized by Hume and the Utilitarians.

Many later thinkers would accept the view that property can only be
justified by its tendency to promote the public good without admitting that
" good " means only pleasure.

Locke's principle on the whole followed by Kant.

Kant's influence produced a tendency in Idealists generally to treat the
rights of property as natural rights, e.g. in Hegel ; but Hegel's influence
valuable (a) in promoting a more spiritual view of the State and its functions,
(b) in emphasising the influence of property upon character — its necessity as
an expression of personality.

The extreme Individualism of Herbert Spencer based on same principle
as Locke's, aided by a misapplication of the Darwinian doctrine of the
" struggle for existence." He failed to see that private property implies as
much State interference as Socialism.

The influence of Hegel on T. H. Green and other English Idealists.

The general tendency of modern political thought is to base the
justification and the limitation of property-rights upon their social effects,
including moral effects.

Bosanquet's insistence upon the necessity of private property for the
development of character : a man's future must depend upon his own
efforts and foresight.

Value of the principle admitted — as also the importance of liberty for
social development, even if this liberty can only be fully enjoyed by the few.

Criticism of Professor Bosanquet : (a) he seems to forget that Socialism
does not condemn private property but only private capital ; (b) he too
readily assumes that private property must always imply the present rights
of inheritance and capitalisation ; (c) while rightly insisting on the good
effects of property upon character, he ignores the intense selfishness promoted
by the present system of almost unlimited competition.

The problem of the future is gradually to modify the institution so as to
secure its good effects, economic and moral, without its injustices and
other bad effects. The whole question must be solved by an appeal to the
social effects of different systems, not by any a priori principle.

II

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY
OF PROPERTY

A HISTORICAL SURVEY AND CRITICISM

IT will be impossible in a short article to dwell on the
earlier history of speculation on this subject. Plato's
drastic treatment of the institution must be passed over
altogether ; and after all, the Platonic Utopia has little
bearing on modern controversies, for it was apparently
only for a particular class that his Communism was
designed. It would be more to the point to dwell
upon the theories of Aristotle ; for there is much in
his treatment of the subject which is of the highest
significance for the modern world. Nobody understood
better the advantages of private property as an institu-
tion ; and yet he was far indeed from the position of
modern Individualists. His fundamental thought was
that property was an instrument of life — of the highest
life ; and he recognized that not an unlimited but a
limited amount of property was necessary for such
a life. For him the ideal arrangement was that half
the land of the state should be held in common and
only half held by private owners, and he thought it
desirable that in the original distribution of wealth
extreme inequalities should be avoided ; but he was far
too keenly alive to the dangers of Revolution

35

36 PROPERTY n

— that ever-present peril in the ancient City-state — to
favour a compulsory expropriation of existing owners.
His objection to lending money upon interest does
perhaps imply some suspicion of the moral difficulties
connected with it : but he had no conception at all of
the true functions of capital, and so fell into the
economic fallacy so familiar to us from the speech of
Antonio in the Merchant of Venice^ that usury is
wrong because " barren metal " does not breed. It
never occurred to him that, though money does not
breed, it will buy a cow which does breed. If A
borrowed from B £20 for a year, and bought therewith
a cow, and then proposed to hand B back the cow (or
the £20 which it cost) and keep the calf, the absurdity
would be evident. Nor did he recognize that, if all
lending upon interest is to be condemned, the con-
demnation would fall as much upon the aristocratic
land-owning citizen — the type with him of all that was
excellent and respectable — as well as upon the despised
alien money-lender. In fact Aristotle was far too much
imbued with the prejudices of the aristocratic class to
be capable of discussing the subject in any fundamental
manner. The ethical question as to the justification of
private property and private capital (he, of course, does
not distinguish between them) is never fairly raised.
So far as the problem is raised and answered, the
answer amounts to this : That material wealth is
necessary as a condition of the higher life ; and that
some measure of private property is more conducive to
the higher life than any form of common ownership,
because (i) it tends more to real unity of sentiment
(the raison d^etre of the Platonic Utopia) than Com-
munism ; (2) it is economically superior to it, for
people bestow more attention upon the management of
private than of public property ; (3) ownership is a
source of pleasure ; and (4) it is more conducive to
the growth of character, for Communism destroys the

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 37

possibility of exercising two important virtues, self-
control and liberality.1 It is not too much to say that we
have here an outline of the best that has ever been said
in defence of private property ; but the difficulties of the
subject are not appreciated. Aristotle's intensely aristo-
cratic moral theory, according to which virtue was only
possible to gentlemen of education and "private means,"
while the slave and even the free artisan (if he was not
a citizen) were mere means to virtue or noble life in
another, prevented his arriving at any fully thought
out theory which could be acceptable to those who
have rejected his narrow civic and class morality.

Both Stoicism and Christianity contributed to the
establishment of a more universalistic and more humani-
tarian ideal of life. And there is much in the teaching
of the Christian Fathers, as well as of the Stoic
Philosophers and of the great Roman Jurists (the
earlier of whom were powerfully affected by Stoic ideas,
arid the later also by Christianity), which would be
well worth examining if space allowed (see below,
Essays IV.-V.). Within our limits it is only possible to
remark that the Christian teachers were for the most
part occupied merely with the question of private
ethics, not of State regulation : in so far therefore as
they felt scruples about the justification of large private
wealth, the moral drawn was simply an inculcation of
almsgiving. So far as there is any definite ethical
theory of property, the general tendency is to admit
that originally, and therefore " naturally," all things
were common, but that private property is necessitated
by that corruption of human nature which was brought
about by the Fall. Still, in so far as the actual state of
human nature required such a private appropriation of
goods, this very necessity constitutes a certain justifica-
tion for it. So far the tendency was to treat the laws
of property as a branch of positive law, and to find the

1 Aristotle, Politic^ ii. pp. 1261 15-1263 b.

38 PROPERTY n

justification for them in the same considerations which
justified the State in general.1 During the Middle
Ages the question of the right and justification of the
State's authority was a matter of lively controversy.
The Decretum of Gratian — the famous text-book of
Canon Law which appeared about 1142 — finds the
origin and justification of the State in a supposed
original contract ; and though it had to contend with
other theories, the tendency during the latter portion
of this period was towards a general acceptance of the
theory which found the justification of the State in
a contract or agreement, the duty to observe which
belonged to natural law and was itself independent of
State enactment. It was implied in this theory that all
property rights must be derived from the authority
of the State, and must therefore be liable in the last
resort to be overruled for the public good by that
authority. At the same time the absoluteness of the
power which this view seemed to give to the State-
that is, practically in most cases to a monarch who was
becoming more and more despotic — made the defenders
of law and public right unwilling to acquiesce in a
view which placed all property at the mercy of the
ruler, and anxious to find a basis for their rights in the
requirements of natural law. This was done by what
we may call an ethical application of the purely legal
theories about occupatio. The Jurist as such was not
concerned with the strictly ethical question, but he was
concerned with the question how and when private
property was to be recognized, how it was to be
distinguished from that which was not property at all
or which was in some sense common property — in fact

1 For further information as to patristic and mediaeval views about property, see
Essay V. j also Carlyle, History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, I. chap, xii.,
II. chap, ii., etc. ; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, ed. Maitland, pp.
78 5^., 178 sq. et passim. It must be remembered that the ancient and mediaeval
thinkers were largely prevented from taking a strong view of the naturalness or
sacredness of property by the fact that for them property included slaves. The
tendency was therefore to rest its justification solely upon the authority of the State.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 39

what constituted a valid title to property : and this
question was one which to some extent involved the
historical question as to the origin of private property.
Now it was a simple matter of historical fact that one
at least of the ways in which private property began
was by some person or persons "occupying" or
appropriating to his or their own use something which
previously was unappropriated (res nullius] ; and the
Roman Law recognizes such occupatio as a valid title to
property. So far the theory was merely legal and
historical ; but it was an easy step to find in this
historical fact an ethical justification of the institution.
This occupatio was morally justified by the theory
that the appropriation involved labour, and that this
labour gave the appropriating individual a right to the
fruits of his labour, in accordance with the provisions
of natural law. That a man who takes the trouble
to cut down a tree in a wild and unappropriated forest
and make a canoe of it should be allowed to keep the
canoe and reserve it for his exclusive use, is indeed so
natural and convenient an arrangement that it has been
recognized by most primitive peoples and savage tribes.
This recognition is not, we are told, universal ; in some
primitive communities the tribal instinct is so strong,
and the recognition of the individual's claims so weak,
that there would not be the smallest notion that the
making of a canoe gave a man any title to prevent his
fellow tribesmen using it on the following morning.
Still, on the whole, private ownership in things actually
and obviously created by labour is a fairly primitive
and fairly universal human institution. And it was
natural enough to extend the same mode of thinking
to the case of cultivated land, though the more
careful study of primitive history has taught us that as
a rule the first appropriation and cultivation of land
was the work of groups rather than of individuals. It
was tempting to the philosopher in search of a theoretical

40 PROPERTY n

justification of property to accept this natural instinct
of appropriation, and the legal notions which had
grown out of it, as an ultimate solution of his difficulties
and not to go behind it. Sometimes the justification
was eked out either by utilitarian considerations or by
the theory of a general consent, given either directly
to the principle that occupation or labour constitutes
ownership, or indirectly as a corollary of the general
agreement that the State which has sanctioned this
arrangement is to be obeyed.

I shall not attempt to follow the growth of these
ideas through the Fathers, the Jurists, the Canonists, the
Schoolmen, the modern juristic thinkers like Grotius,
or the earlier modern Philosophers. The subject is
not prominent in the earliest modern Philosophers,
except quite incidentally as a department of Ethics.
Speaking very broadly, the general tendency was to
defend the institution of private property and the
prohibition of theft on utilitarian grounds, as conducive
to the good of human society, whether that good was
made to consist in mere pleasure (as with Hobbes) or
in some higher kind of Well-being. I will pass
immediately to the writings of Locke, whose version
of the theory already touched upon — the natural right
to the fruits of one's labour — has become the basis of
almost all the attempts of modern philosophers to
base the justification of private property upon some
a priori principle, and not upon the ground of general
utility and convenience.

Strictly speaking Locke was himself a pure Utilitarian.
In his Essay he strenuously denies the existence of
any " innate practical principles," and occasionally in
his Treatise of Civil Government he attempts to defend
the doctrine that labour confers ownership on utilitarian
grounds — as a means to the general good ; but in
general, when dealing with this subject — as indeed in
his political speculation generally — he entirely forgets

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 41

his utilitarian principles, and treats the theory as if
it were indeed an "innate practical principle." The
explanation of this curious lapse is to be found in the
circumstances of his time. There was a general agree-
ment among the thinkers too enlightened to accept
the High Anglican divine right of Kings, that the
authority of Government must be found in a supposed
original contract. Primitive men had elected a
Sovereign and agreed to obey him, and there is a tacit
agreement of living men to go on obeying the State.
The chief subject of dispute was as to the limits of the
authority thus conferred. Hobbes, as a champion of
Absolutism in the State — that is to say, as regards
England, of absolute Monarchy — treated that authority
as practically unlimited.1 Locke as a Whig was interested
in setting limits to it. In particular he endeavoured
to turn the familiar Whig doctrine " No taxation
without representation " from an accepted maxim of
the English constitution, or a convenient understanding
for any developed political community, into an absolute
ethical principle. He admitted that Monarchy might
be a lawful form of government when established by
general agreement. In such a government a King
might make laws and issue orders, and it was the duty
of the subject to obey them, but there was one
thing which the most absolute monarch in the world
could not lawfully do : he could not take a sixpence
out of his subject's pockets without his express consent
given personally or by representation. The King
could make laws under which the subject could be
shot ; he could enter upon a war and compel him
to fight in it and be shot by the enemy ; he could
interfere with his liberty and convenience in a thousand
ways without any consent except the assumed con-
sent to enter into political society ; but no original

1 See the early chapters of his Leviathan. The theory had been already adopted
by Hooker in the first chapter of his Ecclesiastical Polity.

42 PROPERTY ii

consent or consideration of social advantage, however
pressing, could overcome the inherent sacredness of
the breeches pocket. To maintain this theory it was
necessary to represent that the institution of private
property did not depend simply upon any laws made
by the Sovereign, but was part of the law of nature,
and as such existed already in the supposed state of
nature prior to the institution of civil society. It
rested upon the law of nature.

Hobbes had represented the state of nature as one
in which there was absolutely no law and no morality,
no duties and no rights. Every man could do what
he liked and take what he liked — checked only by the
equally comprehensive right of every one else to do
the same. Only when men had entered into a contract
to obey a common superior did any rights or obliga-
tions arise. Not so with Locke. According to him
individuals in a state of nature had certain rights and
certain corresponding duties, discernible by the light
of nature and prescribed by its laws. Among these
" laws of nature," or self-evident moral principles, was
this : that every man has a right to his own person, to
his own labour, and to that with which he mixes his
labour.

"Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common
to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person : this
nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body,
and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath
provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and
joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it
his property. It being by him removed from the common
state nature hath placed it in, hath by this labour something
annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men.
For this labour Kefng the unquestionable property of the
labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once
joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in
common for others.

II

THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 43

" He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under a
oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has
certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny
but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin
to be his ? when he digested ? or when he eat ? or when he
boiled ? or when he brought them home ? or when he picked
them up ? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not
his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between
them and common ; that added something to them more than
nature, the common mother of all, had done ; and so they
became his private right. And will any one say he had no
right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated, because
he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his ? was
it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in
common ? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had
starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him."1

Private property in land can be acquired in the
same way — by mixing one's labour with it — though in
a state of nature these rights are qualified by certain
important reservations. In the first place, a man may
only appropriate as much wealth as he can use. " The
same law of nature that does by this means give us
property, does also bound that property too. c God
has given us all thing richly' (i Tim. vi. 12). Is
the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration ? But
how has He given it us ? c To enjoy/ As much as any
one can make use of to any advantage of life before it
spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in.
Whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and
belongs to others." 2 Thus if a man plucks apples and
heaps them up beneath the tree, his labour in plucking
them gives him a right to appropriate them. The
next wayfarer coming along must starve rather than
touch them ; but if the plucker lets any of the apples
perish uneaten, he is a thief. This restriction is
meant no doubt to apply to the case of land as of other
property. But in the case of land in particular a very

1 Treatise of Civil Government, chap. v. §§ 27, 28.
2 Ibid. § 31.

44 PROPERTY n

significant restriction is (as we have seen) introduced,
though in a hesitating manner — " at least where there is
as much and as good left for others." Private property
in land may have been justified on these principles " in
the beginning " or when " all the world was America " ;
but it is difficult to see how he .could have thought that
it justified private property as it existed in England at
the end of the seventeenth century.

What shall we say to this theory ? Is it self-
evident that a man has a right to all that his labour
produces ? Rights are meaningless except as the
converse of duties. To say that a man has a right to
all that his labour produces, means that other people
are under a moral obligation to let him enjoy all that
his labour produces. Is it self-evident that they ought
to do this, even if the consequences to Society should
be disastrous ? Was a party of primitive men — if we
presuppose Locke's unhistorical conception of primitive
life — wandering over an unappropriated prairie, morally
bound to allow an individual who had got a few miles
beyond them to appropriate all the available apples or
acorns or dates? Ought they to starve rather than
interfere with his hoard, until it was proved by ex-
perience that he had appropriated more than he could
consume ? And then, if we concede the right to what
the labour produces, what about the material with
which he chooses to " mix his labour " ? Labour
produces nothing without some material, which is
always in the last resort some part of the soil or of the
things that grow out of it. May a man mix ever so
little labour with ever so much raw material, and yet
secure a right over that material for himself and his
heirs for all time ? May he by merely constructing a
ring-fence round some thousand acres of the best soil,
or perhaps lightly scratching its surface with a plough,
secure that property to himself, his heirs, and assigns
for ever ? If we concede that his labour gives him the

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 45

property in it for his lifetime, what about his heirs
who have not laboured upon it? Is there any self-
evident principle which determines what is to become of
it after his death ? Locke assumes that the English
liberty of bequest (not altogether unlimited in Locke's
time) was the "natural" arrangement. Yet a will of
lands was only made possible by a statute of Henry
VIII. ; and in case of intestacy three separate systems of
distribution prevailed (and still prevail) even within the
limits of England. In the greater part of the country
the whole of the real estate goes to the eldest son ; in
certain parts of the county of Kent it is equally divided
in accordance with the custom of Gavelkind ; while
in other parts of the country it all goes to the youngest
son, in accordance with the custom of Borough English.
Are all these arrangements in accordance with the law of
nature ? Locke would probably have urged that these
were modifications of the law of nature introduced by
the State-made or civil law, which derived its authority
from the social contract. But it is not apparent how
the contract, the obligation to keep which itself rests
upon a principle of natural law, can override other
laws of nature which are (according to Locke) as sacred
and absolute as the law that contracts shall be kept.
And after all the law of nature only conferred a
limited right of property. What has become of the
limitations which restricted property to as much as a
man could use and no more, and qualified even this
principle as regards land by the " at least when there is
as much and as good left for others " ?

The best way of criticizing Locke's theory is to j
show that, when thought out, it contradicts itself.
Let us suppose that ten men appropriate a desert
island, divide it among themselves, and cultivate their
respective shares. Each of them has ten sons, and
having a taste for " founding a family " leaves his share
to the eldest. In the next generation there will be ten

46 PROPERTY ii

landlords and ninety landless men. These men have
a sacred, natural right to the fruits of their labour :
but how are they to exercise it ? They will say to
the elder brothers : " We have a right to labour :
let us work on your lands." " By all means," the
elder brothers will say, " on condition of paying over
to us all that the land produces over and above what
will keep you and your families." In that way the
principle contradicts itself. The rights of property,
supposed to be derived from a man's natural right to
the fruits of his labour, involves the negation of that
right in the non-inheritors of property. This is exactly
what Karl Marx and the a priori Socialists saw. They
accepted Locke's own principle, and expressed it in
the only logical form — " the labourer has a right to
the whole produce of his labour." But this right is
defeated by any private appropriation of land and
capital ; therefore all land and capital, all the " instru-
ments of production," must be held in common.
Thus the same principle which was intended by Locke
as the basis of a system of extreme Individualism, has
become the corner-stone of a system of extreme and
thorough - going Socialism. Upon the premisses it
cannot be denied that the socialistic application- is the
more logical. And yet in one way the socialistic
application is open to the same fundamental objection
as Locke's. It might possibly be applied to a very
primitive society in which each individual, or rather
each family, produced by their own unassisted efforts
everything that they wanted. But in a piece of cloth
woven in a modern factory, who shall say how much
of the finished product was really due to the weaver,
how much to his assistant, how much to the shepherd
who tended the sheep, how much to the merchant
who brought it to market ? And then the soldier,
the magistrate, the policeman, the schoolmaster, the
builder, who all indirectly took part in its production,

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 47

will reasonably contend that they too assisted to make
that piece of cloth, and will demand their shares. But
the maxim gives us no guidance as to the principle
upon which the resulting wealth is to be divided
between all these classes of labourers without all sorts
of supplementary principles, about the justice or
reasonableness of which endless disputes arise. And
then after all, as Locke saw, the appropriation of
Capital by the State only settles difficulties of dis-
tribution so long as " there is as much and as good
left for others." The Karl Marx theory may justify
the appropriation of land as between the members of
a particular section inter se ; but it assumes the appro-
priation of the whole country by a particular community,
and this cannot be justified as against the inhabitants
of less favoured regions, if labour alone can confer a
title to the enjoyment of wealth. Nobody has created
the soil with which the man has mixed his labour.
The fundamental question which Locke's theory raises
is, whether any principle for the regulation of property
or the enjoyment of wealth can claim to be self-evident
apart from all considerations of social effects.

It cannot be too strongly insisted that the question
of property is only a particular department of the more
general question, whether there are any a priori self-
evident rights ; and that in turn depends upon the
question whether there are any duties which can be
laid down a priori^ and without reference to the
social effects of conduct. Rights are meaningless apart
from duties ; if all duties spring in the last resort from
the duty of promoting the general good, then rights
must also be shown to spring from the same principle.
This was seen by Hume, who is generally regarded as
the founder of modern Utilitarianism, the system
according to which all duty consists in promoting
the general good — interpreted to mean nothing but
happiness in the sense of pleasure. The system was

48 PROPERTY

ii

really much older than Hume. But Hume did much
more than his predecessors in attempting to apply the
principle to the details of duty ; and he made a much
more systematic attempt than they to meet some of
its obvious difficulties. One of the most conspicuous
of these was connected with the question of property.
If an act is always right which produces a maximum
of happiness, how could any act be more justifiable
than to pick the pocket of a Duke, who would not
feel the loss, and to give the proceeds to a beggar to
whom it would give much pleasure ? Hume met this
difficulty by the great utilitarian principle of the general
rule or the long-run. Many isolated acts might
produce happiness, which would be socially disastrous
if generally imitated.

To make this (the principle that the idea Justice is based upon
Utility in an indirect and artificial way) more evident consider,
that, tho' the rules of justice are establish'd merely by interest,
their connexion with interest is somewhat singular, and is
different from what may be observed on other occasions. A
single act of justice is frequently contrary to public interest ;
and were it to stand alone, without being followed by other
tacts, may, in itself, be very prejudicial to society. When a
man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great
fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and
laudably, but the public is a real sufferer. Nor is every single
act of justice, consider'd apart, more conducive to private
interest than to public ; and 'tis easily conceiv'd how a man
may impoverish himself by a signal instance of integrity, and
have reason to wish, that with regard to that single act, the
laws of justice were for a moment suspended in the universe.
But however single acts of justice may be contrary, either to
public or private interest, 'tis certain, that the whole plan or
scheme is highly conducive, or indeed absolutely requisite,
both to the support of society, and the well-being of every
individual. 'Tis impossible to separate the good from the ill.
Property must be stable, and must be fix'd by general rules.
Tho' in one instance the public be a sufferer, this momentary
ill is amply compensated by the steady prosecution of the rule,
and by the power and order, which it establishes in society.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 49

And now every individual person must find himself a gainer,
on ballancing the account ; since without justice society must
immediately dissolve, and every one must fall into that savage
and solitary condition, which is infinitely worse than the worst
situation that can possibly be suppos'd in society.1

From Hume the Utilitarian principle passed to
Jeremy Bentham and his followers, the first school
who were actually called Utilitarians. Hume himself
was a man of very conservative views, and little social
or humanitarian enthusiasm. The application which
he gave to his doctrine of property was eminently
conservative; the rights, practically the unlimited
rights, of property had no more ardent champion than
this sceptical and very destructive thinker. Bentham
was, of course, a zealous social reformer ; and would
heartily have favoured any attempt to modify the
actual legal rights of property in any way which
would tend to promote the public happiness. But
the Benthamites were not Socialists. They were, most
of them, ardent champions of a Psychology which
regards the individual's love of his own pleasure as the
supreme motive in human conduct, and of a Political
Economy which was based upon that psychology, and
which was consequently disposed to defend the system
of private capital, with the inducements which it offers
for individual exertion and accumulation, as absolutely
essential to the public good. With the economic theory
we are not now concerned. It is enough to point out
that according to the Utilitarian school the rights of
property spring ultimately from their tendency to
promote the public good. This is a principle in
which both the most ardent Individualist and the
most extreme Socialist may agree. And there has
been, on the whole, a general (though of course not by
any means a universal) disposition ever since the time
of Bentham to argue the question of property upon

1 Treatise of Human Nature, Pt. ii. § 2.

50 PROPERTY n

this basis — upon the question of its social effects.
Karl Marx, indeed, based his Socialism upon an
a priori principle ; but of late the controversy between
Socialism and its critics has generally been conducted
on the assumption that the Utilitarian criterion is to
be accepted. The question has been simply which
system has the greatest tendency to ' promote the
public good. The principle of Utility is practically
assumed in discussing questions of politics or public
policy by many who would (however inconsistently)
refuse to apply it to the details of private morals ;
and it has been even more universally accepted in
popular controversy than among professed philosophers.
The most important qualification of the Utilitarian
principle which has been introduced among philosophers
is that most of them refuse to accept the view that the
good is identical with pleasure. Many of those who
would agree with Bentham in making the justification
and the limitation of property-rights (as of all other prin-
ciples of conduct) depend upon their tendency to pro-
mote the Well-being of human society, decline to follow
him in thinking that Well-being means simply pleasure,
and that pleasures differ only in quantity, not in quality.
They will agree with Bentham as to the impossibility of
pronouncing upon the morality of any human act apart
from its consequences ; they will differ from him as to
the character of the consequences which have to be
taken into consideration. They will admit that what
appear at first sight self-evident moral rules are found
on a little reflection to contradict themselves, to involve
exceptions really based on considerations of social well-
being, and to be really incapable of being laid down
with any definiteness or precision without reference
to such considerations. They will contend that we do
not really understand what an act is until we understand
its consequences, so far as these can be foreseen : and
if consideration of consequences is once admitted, it is

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 51

arbitrary to stop at any particular point. Ideally, an
act is right which tends to promote the largest possible
amount of true human Well-being.1 If so, the duties
which the institution of property imposes must be de-
fended on exactly the same principle — by their tendency
ultimately (with immense stress on the ultimately) to
promote this end. But it does not follow that true
human Good or Well-being consists solely in a greatest
quantum of pleasure. Many of those who would
agree with Bentham in appealing to consequences,
would insist strongly that morality or character or the
good will is an end in itself and the most important
element of Good ; that intellectual and aesthetic activity
are likewise valuable in themselves and not merely on
account of the pleasure which they produce ; and that,
though pleasure is certainly an element in Well-being,
its value depends upon its kind or quality and not
merely upon quantity. Further to develop this view
or the history of the controversies connected with it
belongs to moral rather than to political philosophy.
I can only point out that the question of property is
part of a wider ethical problem ; and that if we accept
a consequential or " teleological " theory of Ethics, we
are bound to make the justification of property depend
upon the same principle. But I must now return for
a moment to the a priori theories held by those who
refuse to accept the teleological theory,2 whether in its
hedonistic or its unhedonistic form.

For the most part the modern attempts to place the
rights of property upon an a priori basis have followed
very much the lines laid down by Locke. Kant, who
introduced such a " Copernican revolution " in Meta-

1 I have developed the ethical theory here presupposed in my Theory of Good
and Evil, and more briefly in a little volume on Ethics in " The People's Books "
Series. This view may conveniently be styled " Ideal Utilitarianism."

2 I.e. a theory which finds the test of the morality of an act in the end which
it promotes : the term " Utilitarianism," when used without explanation or qualifica-
tion, is generally used to imply that this end is maximum pleasure.

52 PROPERTY ii

physics, was the author of no new principle in politics.
He accepted the social-contract view as to the origin
and authority of the State in its crudest and most
individualistic form, and he based property, like Locke,
on what we may call the divine right of grab. The
first occupier acquired thereby a sacred right to the
ownership of it for all eternity. He introduced a
qualification of the theory which brings out with
peculiar distinctness its wholly unethical character.
He held that a man has only a right to so much
property as he can defend, and on this basis attempted
to place on an a priori footing the convenient but
arbitrary rule of international law which makes the
dominion of States extend three miles into the sea,
this being in Kant's time the maximum range of
artillery.1 What Natural Law will have to say when
the guns on both sides of the English Channel can
equally sweep the middle of the intervening waters is
a problem which he has naturally not discussed. In
Kant, however, the theory as to the way in which
property could be acquired in a state of nature was
seriously modified in its application to organized civil
society. In civil society property can only be acquired
by the implicit consent of Society, to which the State
itself owes its authority. And the proper limits to the
State's authority are fixed by the principle that the
State's duty is to exercise the minimum of restraint
under which the maximum liberty of each shall be
compatible with the maximum liberty of every other.
By a maximum of liberty he did not mean any of the
subtler ethical ideas which have been read into the
phrase by later Idealists who have used the same
language, but simply freedom from constraint. It
would be impossible further to develop Kant's view
of property without discussing his whole conception
of the nature of the State and of human society. It

1 Kant's Philosophy of Law, Eng. trans, by Hastie, pp. 82-92, etc.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 53

will be sufficient to say that the influence of Kant has
produced a disposition among idealistic Philosophers
to regard the rights of property as natural rights. We
find in them a tendency to use the formulae of the old
individualist theories, but to give them an attenuated
or sublimated meaning.

Hegel, for instance, — the most influential of these
writers, — tells us that "a person has the right to
direct his will upon any object, as his real and positive
end. The object thus becomes his. As it [the object]
has no end in itself, it receives its meaning and soul from
his will. Mankind has the absolute right to appropriate
all that is a thing.'* It will be observed that in this
passage Hegel passes from " a person " to " mankind "
as though the change made no difference. Nothing
can be more reasonable than that u mankind " has a
right to appropriate material things ; nothing more
unreasonable than to say that any individual has a
right to appropriate any object he pleases, without
considering the effects of such appropriation upon
others. In so far as Hegel is the asserter of a vast
system of absolute, isolated, self-evident " rights," his
system is open to all the objections which we have
noticed to Locke's theory and to the intuitive systems
of Rights and of Morals generally. As regards such
questions as that of property, his speculations were
prevented from leading to any really satisfactory results
by his determination at all costs to defend the exist-
ing order of Society and even the most accidental
peculiarities of the Prussian Constitution of his time.
Every Prussian institution is shown to flow from a
necessity of thought : in England and France apparently
the development or self-manifestation of the "idea"
had constantly gone wrong. But in two ways Hegel
contributed to a better theory of property. In the first
place, although he still used much of the old individual-

1 Philosophy of Rig/it, Eng. trans, by Dyde, p. 51.

II

54 PROPERTY

istic language, he had a more " organic " view of the
nature of Society and a juster view of the functions
of the State. He took a more spiritual view of the
functions which the State could perform, and conse-
quently the moral as well as the merely economic
advantages of private property begin to come into
prominence. In the second place he insisted upon one
particular advantage of property by making much of
the doctrine that property is an expression of personality.
Sometimes this doctrine is in Hegel couched in some-
what bombastic and by no means illuminating language :
"To appropriate is at bottom only to manifest the
majesty of my will towards things,'' and so on. Merely
to say that property is an expression of personality does
not really close the controversy ; for after all, why
should personality be expressed except in so far as
this is a means to human good or actually constitutes
that good ? The real difficulty of the problem begins
where these expressions of my personality begin to
get in the way of other people expressing their
personalities too. But the doctrine does supply a
much needed corrective to the ordinary utilitarian
view, and has tended towards the recognition of
the importance both of character and of intellectual
development as elements in the total Well-being at
which both legislation and individual conduct should
aim.

In order to keep our review of modern thought on
this subject within limits it will be well to confine our-
selves to two of the more recent tendencies of political
thought, and to take our illustrations from this country
only. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century
the influence of the Utilitarian School in its Ben-
thamite form began to be disputed by the growth of a
school which professed to found its doctrine upon the
Darwinian doctrine of Evolution. The most popular
representative of this tendency was Herbert Spencer.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 55

His Ethics were fundamentally Utilitarian ; but he
attempted to extract from the teaching of Darwinism
the doctrine that, as a means to the increase of pleasure,
it was essential that the struggle for existence should
go on unchecked by excessive State interference.
Any meddling with private property which went beyond
the most indispensable taxation was held to constitute
such an excessive interference ; and in his zeal for
Individualism he revived what was substantially the
theory of Locke, and justified the extremest view of the
sacredness of property on the ground of a man's natural
right to the produce of his labour. The total incon-
sistency between this theory and the u scientific "
Utilitarianism which he professed in his ethical writings
appears to have escaped his notice. He defends
the principle as a self-evident or a priori truth, and
expressly identified his teaching with that of Kant,
professing (as was his wont) that he was in no way
indebted to that philosopher (whom he had not read)
or to any other previous thinker. He pushed his
practical conclusions far beyond the point reached by
Kant (who, with all his Individualism, was not quite
uninfluenced by the German respect for the State), and
treated the Free Libraries Act as a mere piece of robbery
on the part of Parliament — as much so as the act of any
private individual who should walk into my library and
help himself to my books. This a priori theory has
already been sufficiently examined. As to the attempt
to reinforce it by the application of Darwinism to politics,
it will be enough to say here that it assumes that the
system of private property involves a less measure of
State interference than a system of Socialism or even
Communism. A very little reflection will show that
it is not through an unrestricted struggle for existence,
through laisser-faire on the part of the State, that an
infant of two inherits on the death of his father
a landed estate extending over half a county. It is

5 6 PROPERTY n

rather owing to an extreme interference on the part of
the State with the "natural right" of the strong man to
grab the vacant estate, and to the employment of a host
of legal officials, police, and (if necessary) soldiers to
prevent the fight for the property which in a " state of
nature" would inevitably ensue upon the death of the last
owner. While the popularity of evolutionary theories
in the region of Ethics is by no means at an end, this
political application of the Darwinian theories is too
much out of harmony with the practical tendencies of
the age to exercise very much influence. One still sees
a tendency towards an individualistic application of the
"struggle for existence" doctrine among men of
scientific education ; but neither in the region of
practical politics nor in that of political speculation can
Spencerianism as a system now be regarded as a very
serious force.

The other new factor in recent political thought
comes from the gradual diffusion among university
students, and through them among a wider public, of
German Idealism, especially in its Hegelian form, and
also, it may be added, of the Platonic and Aristotelian
view of the State which was to a large extent the source
of what is best in the political thought of Hegel and his
disciples. In England the first writer who exercised
a powerful influence in this direction was Thomas
Hill Green, who first as a tutor of Balliol and then as
Professor of Moral Philosophy was the most influential
teacher of philosophy in Oxford for some twenty
years before his early death in 1882. Most of the
recent contributions to political thought of the more
speculative type owe a good deal to the teaching of
Hegel, either directly or through Green. I may add
that, though the debt to Hegel is undoubted, the
version of his teaching which is given by his English
disciples is far clearer, freer from absurdity, and more
soberly thought out than is the presentation of it in the

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 57

writings of Hegel himself. The reader who begins with
Green's Principles of Political Obligation and goes on
to Hegel's Philosophy of Right will probably feel that
there is little of value in Hegel which is not better put
by Green.

The versions of Hegel's theory about property which
are to be found in the writings of his English disciples
naturally vary according to the degree of their own
approach to Socialism. In the writings of Green the
Hegelian reverence for the State and the Hegelian
respect for property as the expression of personality are
about equally prominent. His strong sense of the
necessity of property for the building up of character
led him, however, not so much to exalt the sacredness
of property in the hands of the large owner, as to
insist on the necessity of such legislation as would
tend to the diffusion of property as widely as possible
among the masses. A more socialistic version of the
Hegelian teaching is to be found in the writings of
the late Professor Ritchie ; while of a more individual-
istic interpretation the most conspicuous representative
is Professor Bosanquet.

Our present concern is, however, not so much with
practical applications or deductions as with the theo-
retical determination of the ultimate principle by
which the question as to the best way of distributing
the fruits of industry ought to be decided. When
stripped of technicalities, the general tendency of modern
political philosophy — at least as represented by the
more idealistic or spiritualistic writers — is towards the
view that the justification of the institution lies in its
tendency to promote for the whole community a Well-
being which is not to be identified with pleasure, but
which includes the development of character and
intelligence as well as pleasure. Property is, as
Aristotle held, an instrument of the best and highest
life. That arrangement of property is best which

58 PROPERTY n

tends to secure such a life for the whole community
or for as many as possible. It is clear that if this
view of the justification of property be adopted, not
the same system will be suitable at every time and
place. Everywhere the established system has a
prima facie claim to acceptance. Some system for
apportioning wealth is the very first condition of social
well-being, and the maintenance of any such system
is always better than anarchy and confusion. But
every improvement in the established system which
will tend to promote that end better has every justifica-
tion which can be claimed for the existing system.
And the existing system loses its justification the
moment it is shown that it can be improved. It is
extremely important to realize that the question is
not as to the rival claims of two sharply opposed, cut
and dried systems — one a system of private Capitalism
and the other a system called Socialism. Private
property has meant an immense number of different
things at different times and places. Everywhere there
has been some subordination of private property to the
authority of the State in the interests of general welfare ;
and everywhere some collective ownership has subsisted
side by side with private ownership. The King or
the State, the Municipality and all sorts of other
corporations, have everywhere been large property-
owners ; and all States have exercised some sort of con-
trol over the use men make of private property. The
practical question is, " By what system will men be
most stimulated to make a maximum contribution to
the general welfare, and what system will lead to the
widest possible diffusion of the highest kind of life ? "
Under different conditions every system, from a
tolerably extreme individualistic system of private
property to a rather extreme collectivism, might be
the best possible for the particular time and place. To
devise the best possible system for a given time and

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 59

place is a question rather of practical politics than of
political theory.

Are there then, it may be asked, no limits to the
socialization of industry which might conceivably be
desirable under particular circumstances ? Could a
complete suppression of all private property be
conceivably the best system under certain conditions ?
Or is there any sense in which we may say that a
right to private property is one of the eternal and
unchangeable " rights of man " ? It is probable that
the unchangeable character of human nature will
always set strict limits to the possibility of dispensing
with individual and family interest as a stimulus to the
production of wealth ; and some liberty of individual
action, some sphere for the operation of individual
enterprise and energy, will always be desirable on
economic grounds. But a much more certain ground
for insisting on the permanent necessity of private
property as an institution is to be found in what
has already been said as to the necessity for the
development of character. Some liberty of action,
some form of arranging one's own life in advance,
some freedom of choice, and some certainty that a man
will experience the results of his choice, are essential
to the development of character ; and this there cannot
be unless there is some permanent control over material
things. Supposing the whole object of life were to
secure a maximum average of enjoyment to each
individual, it is quite conceivable that, if only certain
initial difficulties of organization could be got over,
a higher average could be reached by some extreme
communistic arrangement under which any man, woman,
or child would be " taken in and done for " by the
State or the Municipality — fed, clothed, instructed,
amused, provided with a set task, compelled to work —
from the cradle to the grave. Not so, if the object
we have in view is the calling out into activity the

60 PROPERTY

ii

individual's best and most varied energies, moral and
intellectual. Nobody has expressed this more forcibly
than Professor Bosanquet. Professor Bosanquet's
Essay on " The Principle of Private Property," in the
collection of Essays called Aspects of the Social Problem ,
is perhaps the best brief treatment of the subject which
has ever been put into print. He insists that for a man
to have everything provided for him reduces him to the
level of a child.

Let us take the child in the family as the extreme type,
and leave out any imitation of grown-up life which his parents
may introduce by way of discipline, by taking away what he
wastes or spoils, and so forth. His relation to things has no
unity corresponding to his moral nature. No nerve of
connection runs through his acts in dealing with the external
world. So with his food ; he may waste or throw away his
food at one meal, he gets none the less at the next (unless by
way of discipline). He gets what is thought necessary quite
apart from all his previous action. So too with his dress.
The dress of a young child does not express his own character
at all, but that of his mother. If he spoils his things, that
makes no difference to him (unless as a punishment) ; he has
what is thought proper for him at every given moment. So
with travel, enjoyments, and education up to a certain point.
What he is enabled to have and do in no way expresses his
own previous action or character, except in as far as he is
put in training by his parents for grown-up life. The essence
of this position is, that the dealings of such an agent with the
world of things do not affect each other, nor form an inter-
dependent whole. He may eat his cake and have it ; or he
may not eat it and yet not have it. To such an agent the
world is miraculous ; things are not for him adjusted, organised,
contrived ; things simply come as in a fairy tale. The same
is the case with a slave. Life is from hand to mouth \ it has
as such no totality, no future, and no past.

Now, private property is not simply an arrangement for
meeting successive momentary wants as they arise on such a
footing as this. It is wholly different in principle, as adult or
responsible life differs from child-life, which is irresponsible.
It rests on the principle that the inward or moral life cannot
be a unity unless the outward life — the dealing with things —

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 61

is also a unity. In dealing with things this means a causal
unity, i.e. that what we do at one time, or in one relation,
should affect what we are able to do at another time, or in
another relation. I suspect that the difficulty in accepting this
principle is largely due to a mistake about inward morality — to
treating the pure will for good as if it could exist and constitute
a moral being without capacity for external expression. This is
a blunder in principle. If all power of dealing effectively with
things is conceived absent, inward morality, or the good will,
vanishes with it. I will return to this point in dealing with
the " no margin " doctrine.

Private property, then, is the unity of life in its external or
material form ; the result of past dealing with the material
world, and the possibility of future dealing with it;0the
general or universal means of possible action and expression
corresponding to the moral self that looks before and after, as
opposed to the momentary wants of a child or of an animal.
A grown man knows that if he does this he will not be able
to do that, and his humanity, his powers of organisation, and
intelligent self-assertion, depend on his knowing it. If he
wants to do something in particular ten years hence he must
act accordingly to-day ; he must be able in some degree to
measure his resources. If he wants to marry he must fit
himself to maintain a family ; he must look ahead and count
the cost, must estimate his competence and his character.
That is what makes man different from an animal or a child ;
he considers his life as a whole, and organises it as such — that
is, with a view to reasonable possibilities, not merely to the
passing moment.1

All this is perfectly true and admirably put. The
necessity for some liberty and some variety of external
circumstances and modes of life for the highest in-
tellectual development is another important considera-
tion which has been much insisted upon by such
writers as Durkheim and Simmel. And here it is
important to notice that the plea for liberty is not
sufficiently met by insisting, as has been so eloquently
and humorously done by Mr. Lowes Dickinson,

1 Essay on " The Principle of Private Property," in Aspects of the Social Problem,
PP- 3°9'3 * *• For a more elaborate treatment of the subject see his Philosophical Theory
of the State.

62 PROPERTY

ii

upon the absurdity of supposing that the propertyless
labourer under the ordinary capitalistic regime enjoys
any liberty of which Socialism would deprive him.1
For it may be of extreme importance that some should
enjoy liberty — that it should be possible for some few
men to be able to dispose of their time in their own
way — although such liberty may be neither possible
nor desirable for the great majority. That culture
requires a considerable differentiation in social condi-
tions is also a principle of unquestionable importance.
But it must not be assumed that liberty and differentia-
tion and opportunities for the development of character
in some or all can only be secured by a continuance
of the whole system of private Capital as it is now
understood.

Professor Bosanquet and many other philosophical
critics of Socialism seem to forget that Socialism does
not aim at the extinction of private property but only
at that of private capital. Under any scheme which is
socialistic without being communistic, private property
might very well exist in the only sense in which the
vast majority (say) of Post Office employees now own
property. A postman under Socialism would be able
to enjoy property with all its moral advantages as fully
as now, except that he would be unable to get interest
on the few pounds which he might at present save and
put into the Savings Bank. It could scarcely be
contended that the right to get a few shillings interest
upon such savings is absolutely necessary to a man's
moral well-being. Professor Bosanquet assumes much
too readily that the moral advantages of Socialism could
not be secured without the permission of capitalization
and of inheritance. No doubt, when we think not so
much of the moral effects upon the average individual as
of the advantage to the community generally of having
some persons in a position to choose their own tasks and

1 Justice and Liberty : a Political Dialogue (1908), e.g. pp. 129, 131.

ii THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 63

dispose of their own leisure, the difficulty of getting
the advantages of property without these incidents of
our present capitalistic system becomes much greater.
I am myself disposed to think that the institution of
property cannot bring with it its full advantages,
economic, moral and social, without some form of
capitalization and some rights of inheritance, however
much these rights may be curtailed and controlled by
the State. But the form which it is desirable that the
institution of property should assume must be settled
by detailed argument as to its advantages and dis-
advantages ; it must be settled by experience, and
with reference to each particular stage of social develop-
ment. We cannot justify the whole capitalistic system
en bloc by the bare formula that property is necessary
to the development of individual character. The
most that we can claim, as a general principle applicable
to all stages of social development, is that without
some property or capacity for acquiring property there
can be no individual liberty, and that without some
liberty there can be no proper development of character;
and further that considerable leisure and liberty of
action, such as is now secured by private capital and
inheritance, for some persons must always be socially
desirable. In this sense we may lay it down that the
institution of property is one of the permanent
conditions of social Well-being or (if we please)
one of the inalienable "rights of man." The exact
form which it should assume must be settled for
each particular stage of social development and each
particular country by the gradual accumulation of
experience, the gradual development and the gradual
criticism of detailed suggestions for social improvement.
Another remark that may be made upon Professor
Bosanquet's defence of private property is that, while
he admirably develops the good effects of the present
system upon character, he seems almost blind to the

64 PROPERTY ii

bad effects upon character of the present almost un-
limited competition and facility for accumulation. It is
undoubtedly a mistake to talk as though all that was
required for " character " was a vague and flabby
" altruism." In the interests of Society itself such
virtues as industry, foresight, self-reliance, self-respect,
and the like are quite as important as the more
obviously and immediately other-regarding virtues.
But the intense selfishness fostered by our present
system must not be ignored. I must, however, leave
to other writers the further discussion of the problem
of Property in its practical application. The leading
idea which I have attempted to bring out by means of
this brief historical sketch is that the justification of
property must depend not upon any a -priori principle
but upon its social effects. Among these effects a
prominent place must always be given to its effects
upon character, and the justification of every pro-
posed amendment of the institution as it now exists
must depend upon these same principles. The problem
of the future is to devise a gradual modification of
the system by which its advantages — the encouraging of
industry, originality, energy, enterprise, individuality
which it affords, the measure of liberty for all and the
greater liberty which it secures for a few, the training
in character and the development of individuality, the
sense of responsibility and of family solidarity which it
encourages — shall be secured without the outrageous
inequalities, the material hardships and uncertainties,
and the injury to character which are produced alike by
excessive wealth and excessive poverty.

Ill
|THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY

BY

A. D. LINDSAY, M.A.

FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

SUMMARY

THE principle of private property has the twofold character of all rights.
It is a right vested in individuals thought of as set over against one another,
and it requires the recognition and protection of society for its existence.
Extreme views which neglect either of these aspects are too obviously
wrong to need consideration. Differences of opinion about the right of
property arise as too exclusive attention is paid to the claims of the
solidarity of society or of the independent development of its individual
members. The first attitude gives rise to the view that property is entirely
the arbitrary creation of society, the second to the view that society must
recognize the right of property but cannot modify or control it. The
attempt to make the right of property inherent in the individual apart
from society is false to the facts of the creation of wealth. Yet the denial
of such rights often leads to mere political opportunism. The good of
society is the criterion of rights, but that good can only be expressed in
the good lives of individuals. Private property can only be defended as a
condition of the good life.

Before such defence is attempted it must be noticed that the right of
private property has taken the most diverse forms, and the same defence
will not serve all forms.

We might try to find a defence of private property in the necessary
separation of men in some respects. If the production of wealth is
co-operative, much consumption is necessarily separate. But property in
things that are separately used, in so far as they are so used, is not the
principle of private property but of Communism. Communism is an
attempt to confine property to use. The disadvantages of such an attempt
to distinguish property in matter not in use and in matter in use, and
confine the first to the community, are that it is hardly compatible with
the discovery of new uses and needs, that it gives enormous power to those
who govern the community, and that it takes from the individual the
necessity for deliberation and foresight. Private property is essential to
the full development of the individual.

This, however, is not an objection to Socialism, which defends private
property in goods to be consumed but attacks it in the means of production
on the ground that the production of wealth is co-operative. Considera-

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 67

tion of the difficulty of distinguishing between the means of consumption
and of production shows that most property does not consist in things but
in power over other men, and suggests that the real basis of the attacks on
property is the evils of the irresponsible power it bestows.

Nevertheless something can be said for private property in the means of
production. Although the production of wealth is co-operative it is not
therefore impossible to distinguish between the different values of the work
of different individuals, and it is essential to encourage in individuals
originality and invention. Giving to certain individuals power to direct
and organize the work of others is also essential. The principle of private
property in the means of production may be defended as being but the
carrying out of the principles of "tools to those who can use them."

On the other side the following considerations must be noted :

1. This defence does not apply to the rights of bequest and inheritance,
lich must be defended on very different grounds.

2. The amount of money earned by any individual may represent only
very roughly his power to serve society.

3. The fact that the power given to individuals by private property
tends to efficiency when rightly used, does not remove the evils produced
by the irresponsible use of that power. We are still faced with the problem
of how we can combine efficiency with control in the interests of society.
But this is precisely the problem of the control of political power which
has in the political sphere been largely solved. The political analogy
should show us that no simple or ready-made solution of the problem
of property is possible, but may also suggest the lines along which a
solution is likely to be found.

Ill

THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY

THE principle of private property partakes in a peculiar
degree of the twofold character of all rights. On the
one hand, as the words show, it implies a right belonging
to individuals, and to individuals thought of as set over
against and excluding one another. Private property
is something in which a man can express his own in-
dividuality and character, and which he can prevent
other people from using. In a society with a developed
system of private property wealth is thought of as
divided up into separate lots : each member of
society has in his property a sphere of his own. On
the other hand private property, just because it is a
right, exists only in and through society. Without
mutual recognition of rights, without respect for law and
its decisions, property could not go on existing. As
society develops, the importance of a man's power to
defend himself, of his physical grasp over his possessions,
becomes less, but private property does not diminish
but increases. A man's own is what society and law
allow him, or what they recognize to be his. On what-
ever principle this recognition is based, it is by virtue
of it that private property exists. Private property
then, like other rights, is a creation of society, yet in the
institution of private property society seems to be
denying its nature and insisting not on the social but on
the individual and exclusive nature of its members.

68

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 69

To neglect either of these two aspects of the right of
property is fatal. For if you take away the recognition
of rights which implies society, property disappears,
and if we would vest all property absolutely in society
as a whole, we should be denying the separate existence
of individuals. Even the most extreme form of Com-
munism must allow a man's property in the food that
he eats. Communism is only an attempt to reduce to a
minimum the right of private use implied in property.
It cannot abolish it altogether.

These two extremes then need not trouble us.
Some sort of recognition must be given to the social as
to the individual character of property. Differences of
opinion as to the place which property ought to
occupy in society arise from the difficulty of adjusting
the claims of the solidarity of society on the one hand,
and the independent development of its individual
members on the other. Some political thinkers would
have all institutions directed to the encouragement of
individuality and leave the solidarity of society to look
after itself. Others take just the reverse view.

When interest is focussed on the individual, society
is sometimes looked upon as a system of mechanical and
external alliances. Property is held to be not created
though it must be recognized by society. The right of
property then is thought to have its source in the in-
dividual regarded not as a member of society but as an
independent unit. It is the business of society to
maintain and make effective this right, but it has no
power to modify it, no control over it. When, how-
ever, such stress is laid on the fact that society is an
organic whole that the units composing it are thought
incapable of independent existence, it is possible to
maintain that inasmuch as property would not exist
without society, it is created by the definite act of
society to suit its convenience, and can be for this same
reason modified or destroyed by society at will. We

70 PROPERTY m

ought not on this view to try to go beyond the
existing right. We cannot discuss what rights of
property the State should recognize, only what it has
recognized or now wills to recognize.

The classical exposition of the first of these views
is found in Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Govern-
ment. It has been described and examined in another
Essay, and need not detain us here. It seeks to found
the right of private property on the principle that a
man has a right to the wealth which he has himself
created. The principle is innocent enough, but it will
not serve the purpose desired of it. It will not suffice
to fit the facts. For much private property cannot
possibly be described as created by those who own it,
and, a more fatal objection, wealth is not created out
of nothing, but by the manipulation of previously exist-
ing wealth or sources of wealth. If these are privately
owned, then all members of society have not an equal
opportunity of creating wealth, and therefore the
apparent justice of the principle that each man should
own what he has created is illusory. Further, the
creation of wealth is not the work of separate indi-
viduals working independently, but is a co-operative
undertaking in which in one way or another the whole
community takes part. In any society of at all
developed economic structure there are almost no
articles of value of which a man can say, " This I and
I alone produced."

The theory really implies that individuals produce
wealth in isolation, and that law and society then re-
cognize the position from without. The facts are quite
otherwise. Men cannot be cut loose from their past,
and regarded as beginning to produce wealth from
what has been nothing before, nor as separated from
their fellows in the act of production. Society has its
part in the production as in the recognition of property.

If society allows each of its members to own property

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 71

which is recognized as his and therefore not another's,
if it seems to think of the individual with his property
as cut off from his fellows, that independence, the private
nature of property, is not based upon the private nature
or individuality of the production. The wealth which
men possess as property was made by co-operation, the
separate contribution to which of each member of
society cannot be exactly estimated. Private property is
recognized by society not in virtue of a right inherent
in the individual, but because it is an institution which
is thought to be for the good of society as a whole.

This does not necessarily mean that private property
is therefore only the creation of convention. The
replacement of the doctrine of absolute natural rights
inherent in the individual by the doctrine that the
standard of all rights is the convenience or good of
society, seems sometimes to imply a justification of
political opportunism. For the convenience or good of
society as a whole might be interpreted as the con-
venience of society at any particular moment, or worse
still, the convenience of an existing government. The
real service of the doctrine of natural rights was that it
gave content to the conception of the good of society,
that it emphasized the truth that the good of society
can only express itself in the good lives of its individual
members. We may still then maintain that the prin-
ciple of private property ought to be recognized by
society, if we can show that it is an essential condition
of the good life. And this is the only possible line of
defence of the principle.

Here one thing must be said in warning. Other
Essays have shown that the right of private property
has existed in the most various forms, exists in different
forms at the present day, and has had the most different
effects. Yet I have talked so far of the principle or the
right of private property as though that were some-
thing simple and always the same. Any discussion

72 PROPERTY in

then of the part played by the institution of private
property in society might seem to require a vast historical
enquiry, unless we can distinguish the principle of
private property from the various forms in which, or
the varied extent to which, that principle has been
recognized.

It is possible, I think, to do this by going back
to a phrase used at the beginning of this paper. In
the institution of private property society seems to
be insisting on the individual, exclusive nature of
its members. We are all members one of another.
No man liveth to himself or dieth to himself. We
are what we are through the influences of society. In
a very real sense it is true that there is nothing of
which we can say that it is our own because we alone
have made it, or because it interests or affects us only.
Yet what is legally mine is not another's, and I have
sharply-defined and clear-cut rights over my property.
On what grounds can such an artificial distinction of
man from man be justified, and how far ought it to be
extended ?

We might begin by attempting to base private
property on actual facts. Men in society form an
organism and yet they remain in some respects distinct.
We cannot separate men in the production of wealth,
that must always be co-operative ; but we obviously
can in the consumption. A dinner that another man
eats is no use to me. There are some things which,
from the necessities of our physical nature, must be
used separately. Private property then may be justi-
fied if it is based on use. Those things are rightly
privately owned, it will be said, which are necessarily
privately used, and in so far as they are so used. Such
a principle, however, has little to do with the principle
of private property as commonly understood. Rather,
it is the principle of Communism. For Communism
is an attempt to confine property to use. The com-

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 73

munity takes over all rights in things that are not
being used, and gives to individual members of society
only these rights which are coincident with prescribed
uses. Private property, as generally understood, implies
rights over things when they are not being used, the
right to use or refrain from using, the right to allow or
to prevent use to others.

A successful state of Communism would imply that
all care of property when it was not being used, all
provision of property in anticipation of its use, and the
reconciliation of all conflicting claims to the use of the
same property would be the business of the community.
The individuals would only have to think what they
wanted to do, to manifest their needs, and if the com-
munal organization was adequate, these would be sup-
plied. Such a system of society is not unthinkable.
It can easily be realized in a family or in a monastery ;
but it is a principle very difficult to realize in an ordinary
political society, and it has a serious moral disadvantage.
The position of property in anticipation of its use
could be organized communally only if the uses of
property remained uniform. Such an organization
would be hardly compatible with the discovery of
new uses and needs by the individual members of
society. Further communal organization can only
mean organization by some individuals on behalf of
the rest, and would be possible only where, as in a
family or a monastery, most members of the com-
munity were content to allow others to arrange their
lives for them. If the control over wealth when it is
not being used is separated from the right over it in
use, and the former assigned to the community, and
the second to the individual, the necessity for delibera-
tion and foresight is taken from the individual. The
moral advantage of private property over Communism
is that it makes the private person think of his life
as a whole, and realize his responsibility for his actions.

74 PROPERTY m

Unless we learn that if we are reckless now we shall
be less able to do what we want in the future, and
that not for want of the permission of others
whom we might try to get round, but because of the
simple law that you cannot eat your cake and have
it, we should probably remain children all our lives.
We need not go to actual systems of Communism to
discover that. It is equally apparent in the life of
those unfortunate sons of very wealthy and foolish
parents who are sure that they will be given as much
money as they may want whatever they may do, as in
those whose livelihood is so insecure that it is not
worth their while to look ahead. Private property
enables the individual to develop that power of planning
and deciding for one's self which is as important a factor
in the good life of society as the sense of community
and interdependence. Its ultimate justification is the
worth of individuality, and the fact that individuality
expresses itself in relation to external goods. This
point is so familiar and obvious that there is no need
to labour it. Most people recognize by this time of
day that the good of society is not helped but hindered
by the elimination of individuality and character in its
members.

Opinions differ as to where these considerations
should lead us. They are often, for example, adduced
as an argument against Socialism, but private control
over the spending of income is as compatible with
Socialism as with the existing system of property.
The Socialist would indeed maintain that under
Socialism more people would be in a position to
enjoy the advantages of private property ; but
Socialism attacks not private property in general, but
private property in the means of production; and it
might well be contended that while spending or con-
sumption should be as individual as possible, the
production of wealth is essentially a co-operative

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 75

undertaking in which the emphasis laid on individuality
by private property is disadvantageous. Any mono-
poly of the means of production can only be harmful.
Let us see then what there is to be said for private
property in the means of production.

The first point which might be made is that no
clear line can be drawn between means of production
and means of consumption, or between capital and
income ; for capital is only created by the income or
the wealth owned by individuals being set aside or
used for a particular purpose. We can point to almost
nothing that is always a means of production or always
a thing to be consumed.

This objection is not a fatal one because there is no
doubt that we can roughly say when wealth is being
used as capital and when as income. But in it we are
confronted with a fact about property which is of the
utmost importance. We often think of property as
consisting in things. When we insist on the importance
of property as a means to the expression of individuality,
we think of the importance of a man's possessing
things that are his own, his own books and pictures,
his own house and so on. But in a society whose
economic organization is at all developed, most pro-
perty consists not in rights to the enjoyment of things,
but in rights to services ; the power to make men act
in certain ways. This power, it may well be contended,
is as essential a part of what makes individuality in
life as is the possession of objects. Far more than
such possession it makes possible the abuses which are
the real grounds of attacks on the principle of private
property. The desire for wealth to consume has after
all got its limits, the desire for power over other men's
lives has not. The difficulty of distinguishing between
property used as a means of production and property
consumed may be used not only as an argument to
defend the first because of the virtues of the second,

76 PROPERTY in

but to attack the second because of the vices of the
first.

But something else can be said for private property
in the means of production. The argument .may be
put in some such way as this.

It may be true that all productive work is co-
operative and that, therefore, no wealth is produced
by individuals in isolation, but it does not follow that
the part played by different individuals is the same
or of equal value. Co-operation is the combining of
different wills and different minds, and all deliberation
and contrivance comes originally from individual minds.
Efficient production is only possible if encouragement
is given to originality and invention in individuals as
much as to the co-operation between all the members
of society. It may be true that power over and control
of other men is liable to abuse, but it is also an essential
instrument in achieving anything of note in combined
effort. If private property gives men the power of
directing others in the work of co-operative production,
that is no evil but a manifest good if that power is in
the hands of those who can use it best. Further, while
it may be true that we cannot divide up wealth into
parts and say this part was created entirely by this man
and this by that, it does not follow that we cannot
estimate the relative importance of the parts played by
different men. On the contrary, a man's income does
roughly express the value which society puts upon his
services, and the money a man makes is a fair criterion
of his capability to use profitably the power over other
men's lives which the possession of property gives.
•Such a criterion may not be infallible. No doubt it is
not, but it is a better criterion than any other which can
be substituted for it. The principle of private property
in the means of production is but the carrying out of
the principle " tools to those who can use them," and
that surely is a principle conceived in the interests not

Ill

PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 77

primarily of the individual but of society. In this
argument there is much truth, in so far as it is an
argument, that individuality in the production of
wealth is for the good of society as well as individuality
in the spending of it, and must be made possible under
any system of property. But it does not follow that
such individuality is best realized under the existing
system of private property. Against that particular
conclusion the following considerations may be urged,
i. Such arguments would not justify the rights
of bequest or inheritance. It may be that the
power of bequest in some form is a necessary in-
centive to effort. It is also true that the solidarity of
the family which the right of inheritance encourages,
though the right of bequest does not, is for the good
of society. Nevertheless in themselves these rights go
against the principle of tools to those who can use
them, in as much as they put great power into the
hands of those whose only claim to it is that they are
the natural or chosen heirs of those who have shown
the capability of u.sing it. Any defence of these rights
must ultimately be based upon a recognition of the
importance and value of the existence of associations
within the State intermediate between the State and the
individual, such as the family or what are called
voluntary associations. The attempt to enforce rigidly
the principle of tools to those who can use them or
money to him who has earned it, and to give all else to
the State would deny the value of all such lesser bonds
and communities. The permanence of the family has a
social value which the right of inheritance helps to
maintain. The practice of charitable bequest led at
an early date to the recognition by law that there are
certain purposes which may well be made more
permanent than the lives of the individuals who serve
them, and which are therefore allowed to own property
and regarded indeed as in some sense persons. How

y8 PROPERTY m

far the rights of property vested in corporations should
be the same as those vested in individuals is a subject
of too great complexity to be entered into here. For
our present purpose it is enough to note that it can-
not be solved by the application of any simple rule.
It demands the adjustment of various interests, each
having a value of its own. The problem of the
position of voluntary associations in the State is one
with a long history behind it, and the powers of such
associations to hold and inherit property has played a
large part in that history. How to preserve the
variety and initiative which the existence of such
associations makes possible consistently with maintain-
ing the stability of the whole State and the freedom
of individual members of each association and of the
State, is perhaps the most difficult of political problems
which confronts us to-day, and one of which there is
certainly no final solution. As little can there be any
final settlement of the rights of property which are
connected with it.

2. To return to the argument that the existing
system of private property is based on the principle
of tools to those who can use them, exceptions
having been now made of the rights of inheritance and
of bequest, it is clear on consideration that the amount
of money earned in any undertaking is obviously only
a' very rough test of its public utility. There are
some ways of making money, e.g. the promotion of
lotteries or gambling, which the State definitely forbids,
thereby claiming that the collective verdict of the
community may override what may be called the
economic verdict expressed in the fact that so many
individual people are prepared to pay money to the
promoters of lotteries. The same principle is implied
in the special taxation on lotteries in countries where
they are permitted, or on the drink traffic. It is also
implied in the State endowment of research or education.

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 79

It is there recognized that research has a value to the
community which is not recognized in the value given
to it in the open market. For it is something which
pays in the long run but perhaps pays no individual
immediately. This is expressed in the common phrase
" the State or a corporation can afford to wait for its
money." The community's judgments of value can
take in a wider range of circumstances, and take thought
for a longer period of time, than the judgments of value
expressed in the economic preferences of individuals.
Even so the argument from money earned to public
service rendered would only hold of a system of
perfectly free competition. Actually it is vitiated
wherever monopoly exists.

3. While it is true that the power given to
individuals by private property tends to efficiency
when rightly used, that does not remove the evils
produced by the irresponsible power thus acquired
with property. It may be the case that as yet no
means have been devised which can prevent these evils
without also taking away the advantages of private
property, and that they are a price which is worth
paying. On that point opinions will differ. But
obviously it would be desirable if the efficiency
produced by the encouragement of individual initia-
tive and the entrusting of power into the hands of
individuals were combined with some means of pre-
venting that power being abused, with some method
of enforcing responsibility. Even if we hold, as
some do, that to encourage in individuals possessing
property a sense of this responsibility is all we can
compass at present, we need not give up hope of
contriving something better in the future.

Here we have the analogy of the control of political
power to encourage us. Indeed once we realize that
property exists mainly as power, we can see that the
problem of the proper regulation of property is only

8o PROPERTY m

the old political problem of the recognition and control
of political power in a vastly more complicated form.
The same difficulty of combining the efficiency which
is given by the concentration of power with the
prevention of its abuse and the insistence that such
power shall be used for social and not for anti-social
ends, has been realized and to some extent solved
in the political sphere. The pressing need for
strong and efficient government in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries made writers like Hobbes
treat political power as the absolute property of the
sovereign, and denounce any attempts to limit such
power or make it responsible as fatal to the efficiency
of government. Means of combining efficiency with
popular control have been evolved but slowly ; no
ready-made or simple solution could possibly have
been found ; it needed the political experience of
generations to achieve a system of responsible govern-
ment. At first the possibility of good government
depended on individual rulers choosing to act as though
they were responsible to their people. But there has
grown up such a system of government as makes the
irresponsible use of political power difficult if not
impossible.

The problem of combining the free use of power
and individual initiative with their control in the
interest of society, of giving scope and yet preventing
the evils arising from irresponsibility, will probably be
much more difficult in the sphere of economic produc-
tion than in that of government for various reasons.
(i) The problem has been solved in the political sphere
only by a strict limitation, in the early stages of the
solution at least, of that sphere. The power given by
property extends to every corner of social life, and is
infinitely more indeterminate and fluid than political
power. (2) The problem has to be solved without
destroying private property in the means of expenditure

in PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY 81

and consumption, and it is not easy to draw the line
between the two forms of property more than roughly.
(3) Initiative and inventiveness are more important in
the economic than in the political sphere, and regulation
of economic will have to be more elastic than regulation
of political power.

We may be confident that no simple ready-made
solution of it will be found. But that is no reason for
supposing that the task is impossible or that the present
makeshift system is the only one that is possible.
Without being able at this moment completely to work
out a better system we may be able to see the direction
in which development is desirable. In the meantime,
if we realize that the existing institution of private
property is not based on absolute right and has no
absolute but only a partial justification, in that while
it makes for the good life of men in society it does
so at a considerable cost, we may see that the system
will be tolerable only if the possessors of property act
as the good sovereign of earlier times acted — as though,
that is, they were under obligations which law is not
yet able or does not think it convenient to enforce.

IV

THE BIBLICAL AND EARLY
CHRISTIAN IDEA OF PROPERTY

BY

THE REV. VERNON BARTLET, D.D. (ST. ANDREWS)

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD

SUMMARY

THE discussion limited for practical reasons to one specific type of religion,
the Biblical and Early Christian.

Here the religious view of Humanity is determinative of property.

I. Old Testament religion : its genius and social implications, as
realized at various periods in Israel's history.

The principles of social justice emphasized by the Hebrew Prophets,
both earlier and later, and in its own way by post-Exilic Judaism
generally.

The prophetic ideal re-emerges in full power in John the Baptist and
in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

II. New Testament religion : the fundamentally social nature of Jesus's
Gospel of the Kingdom of God on earth, as based on the Divine
Fatherhood. Here the ideas of Divine " stewardship " for all a man holds,
and of the rightful use of property as relative to the welfare of persons,
attain fresh depth, emphasis, and range. Such use of property a test of
loyalty to the Heavenly Father and His Will for men.

This felt from the first, but applied in various ways according to
current ideals of human need.

The " communistic " temper of the Primitive Church, on a voluntary
basis of Christian Love, in the New Testament and in sub-apostolic
writings. The Preaching of Peter affords a locus classicus for the early
second century and for the ante-Nicene ideal generally. The Church's
sensitiveness to morally dubious trades, and especially usury.

First explicit discussion of property (to the point of riches) in Clement
of Alexandria early in the third century. It continues the old tradition,
seen also in Tertullian and Cyprian, but adds some more modern
considerations.

Lactantius, early in the fourth century, the next exponent of the
Christian theory of property, which he treats in the light of Justice and
Humanity.

Certain limitations under which the positive Christian idea of property
operated within the Roman Empire, first as pagan, then as officially
Christian. These due to the time-limitation of the Advent Hope, the
Church's earlier status as a small minority, and the genius of the Gospel
as primarily spiritual in its interest.

Hence (#) toleration of slavery as an institution, and (/>) " other
worldly " asceticism. As the foreshortened perspective of the Kingdom of
God on earth was outgrown by experience, the existing social order assumed
a more positive significance as something to be leavened by Christian
principles, especially after Constantine's conversion. But the Church's
grasp on Christian principle in this sphere was no longer such as to make
it take full advantage of the new opportunity, which was largely lost.
Thus the idea of property really remained pagan and Roman rather than
Christian. The fact is that the Church's idea of the Gospel had itself
changed in emphasis. The idea of " retreat " from the world now wide-
spread : the morally aggressive power of " faith " impaired : the negative
aspect of Monasticism and of the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin.

" Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven " an ideal largely lost
since early days ; is now being realized as never before.

Responsibility the note of the religious idea of property, especially in
Christianity, which lays such stress on the value of persons as compared
with things. Between the competing interests of persons, God is the
Great Arbiter as regards just use of His gifts of property.

IV

THE BIBLICAL AND EARLY CHRISTIAN
IDEA OF PROPERTY

OUR subject is the religious idea of property as traceable
in the Bible and in the Early Christian Church. Such
limitation of treatment as this involves is dictated by
practical considerations. It seems best to concentrate
attention on that part of the whole subject which has
most direct bearing on the form in which the idea of
property exists to-day in most minds of the European
type of culture. For our present purpose, then, the
significance of religion generally for the idea of pro-
perty may best be studied under the specific forms of
that religion which has so largely moulded European
society and our own attitude to its institutions.

Every civilization has at its heart its own idea of
Humanity, which, in the last resort, controls its social
thought and practice. Through all varieties of this
idea certain broad distinctions run. Society may be
viewed primarily as a community, the general well-
being of which is all in all, or on the other hand as made
up of individuals, the particular well-being of whom
is of prime importance. Further, on either view
humanity may be viewed on a materialistic basis, as
having its sole ground in Nature in the same way as all
else known to our senses ; or again, on a spiritualistic
basis, as having its real meaning, and therefore its

85

86 PROPERTY iv

ultimate motives of social conduct, in relation to some-
thing above Nature, to some Being akin to, and the
proper source of, the highest element in us. Now it
is obvious that, according as one or other of these
conceptions of persons and their destiny prevails, it
must profoundly affect both theory and practice as
to the distribution and use of the things through
which persons find more or less scope for self-realiza-
tion, that is, touching property in its widest sense.
This being so, it cannot but be that the religious view
of humanity must contribute a factor of profound and
indeed decisive import to the working idea of property,
so far as religion is a real thing to those who profess it.
Religion is in principle all or nothing : by its fruits
it is known one way or another. True, what once
had ethical meaning may be narrowed down to mere
sacred ritual or custom, with no conscious relations to
living conduct, individual or social. But this is simple
lapse into unreality as regards one aspect, and in all
higher faiths the primary aspect, of the full fact of
religion, which is in idea coextensive with the whole
life of personal responsibility. The religion of the
Bible at least, and of the Early Church, was for the
most part really effective in moulding men's social
ideals and conduct ; and we shall now trace in outline
the idea of property which underlay the historical
development of such religion.

In Old and New Testament alike the idea of God
ruled human life in all its relations. At all stages of
Israel's history we find the sense of social duties as
having their chief sanction in the Divine Being with
whose sovereign rights each Israelite felt himself face
to face, in virtue of the Covenant relation on which
the national existence was based. Further, at a certain

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 87

stage, visible for instance in Is. xl. ff., there emerges a
clear consciousness of the God of Israel as the Creator
and Upholder of all things. In this character He
possesses absolute rights to the allegiance of all men,
and not only of His Chosen People, in soul, body, and
goods of every sort. All these things, powers of
mind and body as well as material possessions, are
held in stewardship for God, and for His ends in
creating mankind to show forth and share His " glory "
or manifested nature. It was relative to this outlook
on the world, and on life in society, that property was
conceived of in Hebrew religion ; and it can readily be
imagined how powerful an incentive to social justice
and to social reform, as ideals grew in range and
purity, such a conception would present to truly
religious minds in Israel.

Let us recall some of the leading expressions of
Old Testament religion bearing on the matter in hand.
" In the beginning God created " the earth and all
upon it, and finally man as the crown of His purposes
on earth. Man, then, was created as God's vice-
gerent over the lower creation, as being " made in the
image of God," or as Psalm viii. has it, "but little
lower than Deity " (Elohim\ in respect of his latent
capacities, insignificant though man is on his material
side. Accordingly David is described as addressing
God as follows, in connection with the offerings of
Israel for the building of the Temple (i Chron. xxix.) :

Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power . . . and the
majesty : for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is
thine ; thine is the kingdom (sovereignty), O Lord, and thou art
exalted as head above all. Both riches and honour come of
thee, and thou rulest over all ; and in thine hand it is to make
great, and to give strength unto all. . . . But who am I, and
what is my people, that we should be able to offer so willingly
after this sort ? for all things come of thee, and of thine own
have we given thee. . . . O Lord our God, all this store . . .

88 PROPERTY iv

cometh of thine hand, and is all thine own. . . . O Lord, the
God of our fathers, keep this for ever in the imagination of
the thoughts of the heart of thy people, and establish their
heart unto thee.

Here we have a perfect expression of the genuine
Hebrew view of human property — all that a man can
call his own and control — as verily the gift of God, to
be held before all else in trust for the Giver's own
uses, for the realization of His kingdom or mani-
fested sovereignty on earth. Such rights, then, as
any man can have in anything he possesses — his
faculties of body and mind, lands and all in or upon
them, and what is " produced " (by God's power and
bounty) as result of human faculty applied to the
resources of Nature — such " property " rights are purely
relative, derivative, conditional, in the presence of
God's sovereign overlordship of all He has produced,
and is still producing, through the subordinate agencies
of Nature and man. None on earth has absolute or
indefeasible rights, but all only in so far as they fulfil
the terms of the stewardship entrusted to them by God
and the duties to others which flow therefrom. This
applies alike to nations and to individuals. But the
Divine will for and in the larger unit of its purposes
must be regulative of the same will for and in the
smaller unit of humanity, so that the rights of the
latter are relative to those of the former as a whole.
In other words, the general or national welfare is prior
to and determinative of that of the individual in the
Divine order, and so by right.

To this conception of property, its duties and rights,
the general trend of the Old Testament data broadly
and normally conforms ; and there are constant signs
of a tendency to reform actual conditions, when these
seem to diverge intolerably from the Divine ideal.
The various forms of the Mosaic legislation found in
the different codes embodied in the Pentateuch illustrate

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 89

this tendency.1 We can see the process of social reform
going on before our eyes, and realize the religious
motives which animated reformers, in the pages of the
Hebrew Prophets. The occasion of their utterances
was the great change for the worse in economic con-
ditions— away from a relatively equal ownership of land
—which was due partly to losses from foreign invasion,
plunging the poor into debt to the richer members of
the community, and partly to the new factor of com-
merce fostered by foreign intercourse. In these and
other ways the sacred bond between the family and the
land — conceived to belong to the nation's God and to
have been given by Him to all Israelites to enjoy in
essential equality for ever — was broken. There arose
a landless and dependent class, sometimes to the point
of enslavement of Israelite to Israelite. This last was an
abomination in the eyes of all save those who themselves
made property of their fellows. But even the lesser
abuse, as a virtual negation of the idea of brotherhood
before God, the real owner of the land and of all its
increase, stirred prophets like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and
Micah to witness that social justice is of the essence
of true religion. Their constant language is of the
" oppression " of the weak by the strong, as when
social and economic advantages were used to increase
any accidental inequality in the distribution of material
goods, and this often under the forms of law and
justice. "Jehovah will enter into judgment with the
elders and princes of his people. It is ye that have
eaten up the vineyard ; the spoil of the poor is in your
houses. What mean ye that ye crush my people, and
grind the face of the poor ? This is the oracle of the
Lord." Or again, <c Woe unto those who join house to
house, who add field to field, till there is no more room,
and ye are settled alone in the midst of the land." 2

1 See Dr. W. H. Bennett's Essay in Christ and Civilization (1910), tiassin.
2 Isaiah iii. 14 f., v. 8 j cf. i. 17.

90 PROPERTY iv

Here what is chiefly condemned " is really the iniquitous
distribution of the gain and loss arising out of the
social changes " of the period : " the profit mainly
falls to a limited class . . . callous, self-seeking, and
self-indulgent, and deepens their moral deterioration ;
while the loss is borne by the poor and helpless."
Over against such injustice and oppression, flowing
from self-seeking use of economic power, the prophets
place the outraged Justice of the all-sovereign King of
Israel, who is the one real Owner of the land and of its
produce, and whose prime concern in its use is the
well-being of all His People. Any other use of it is
sacrilege, simply robbing God. This is the idea under-
lying the Sabbatical Year and the Year of Jubilee. The
former provided for the poor from the land as it lay
fallow in the seventh year (Ex. xxiii. 10 f.), as well as
for the release of the Hebrew from bondservice (Ex.
xxi. 2 fF., Deut. xv. 12 ff.), or from debts (Deut. xv. i ff.).
By the latter Leviticus makes similar provision for
the recovery of " liberty throughout the land," for all
Hebrews, at the longer interval of fifty years. As
regards land, it all reverts to its original owners (xxv.
10) ; it " shall not be sold in perpetuity ; for the land
is Mine ; for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me "
(v. 23). As to bondservice, even in the modified
form of hired service, which alone Leviticus allows, it
too then ceases ; " for unto Me the children of Israel
are servants ... I am the Lord your God" (v. 55 ; cf. 42).
Both of these ordinances, then, in theory at least,
recognize in a striking and radical way the sovereign
rights of Jehovah as the Overlord, as it were, of the
theocratic Feudal System of Israel, and the supreme
value of persons over property in His eyes. It is in
this light that the Eighth Commandment must be read.
So viewed, it tells against all accumulation of land and
wealth as " private property " which affects inequitably

1 Bennett (as above), p. 58.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 91

and oppressively the opportunities and welfare of men
and women, as God's own special property.

If the later prophets, a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel,
when face to face with a disintegrated Israel, " feel that
a true social organism can be created only out of true
individual members, they never abandon the idea of
founding a new social organism. Individualism is but
the necessary stage towards this," by creating more
responsible moral units.1 While trying to lay the
foundations of religion more deeply in the individual
conscience, and on God's Covenant in the heart, they
do not forget the cause of social justice. They, too,
echo in effect2 Micah's memorable words (vi. 8) : "He
hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what
doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." Here
we have the very essence of prophetic religion, social
justice and mercy, rooted in an abiding sense of God's
eye upon all a man's ways. It is the exact opposite of
the attitude in which one claims a right " to do as one
pleases with his own property." The decisive question
for a man who " walks humbly with his God " would be,
" Lord, what would'st Thou have me to do with Thine
own ? " By whatsoever means it has come to him, it
still has come from God, and remains by right under
His control.3

Even after the Exile, one great act of reparation
seems to have been achieved by Nehemiah,4 when by
moral suasion he induced the wealthy to restore lands
and houses to expropriated poorer brethren. The post-
Exilic prophets 5 still breathe much of the old spirit :
" The fast is worthless when the worshipper oppresses

1 Dr. A. B. Davidson, article " Prophecy " in Hastings's Diet, of the Bible, vol. iv.

2 Jer. vii. 6, xxii. 3, 13, xxxiv. 8-22 ; Ezek. xviii. 8, xxxii. 7 f., 29, xxxiv. 8, 17
ff"., xlvi. 1 8.

8 Ps. xxiv. i ; Job xli. n. 4 Nehemiah v.

5 Dr. Bennett specifies, e.g., Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii., Ivi.-lxvi., Haggai, Zechariah,
Malachi, Joel.

92 PROPERTY iv

his labourers ; the true fast is to loose the bonds of
wickedness and let the oppressed go free, to feed the
hungry, to house the outcast, and to clothe the naked "
(Is. Iviii. 3-8). And the witness of the Wisdom
writings is to like effect,1 notably in Job's picture of the
righteous man (xxix., cf. xxxi.). Yet here the old
prophetic insistence on the "justice " which goes to the
root of social evils by enabling men to remain self-
supporting, has already dwindled to praise of the
c< mercy," which tries to cope with the resulting distress.
The latter is relative to the religious ideal of a society
too individualistic to feel the divine discontent of the
older prophecy, though it kept on turning out the
extremes of need and superfluity. If a pious soul here
and there prayed, like Agur (Prov. xxx. 8 f.), for the
happy mean between poverty and riches, it was for its
own spiritual welfare, and not as the condition of a like
lot falling to others also, which is the moral principle
and test of a true social order. " Under the abnormal
conditions of foreign domination, religion had grown
narrower and feebler, when it was forced back from the
great national and human interests into an ecclesiastical
habit of mind. . . . It became legal, fixed, monotonous,
a thing by itself. . . . The prophetic voice was hushed
and the prophetic fire died out."2 Yet there is evidence
even in the later post-Exilic Judaism that the old ideal
of social righteousness remained for many in Israel the
essential test of piety. Thus, in Malachi iii. 5, Jehovah
warns, "I will come near to you in judgment" — the
setting right of what is wrong — "against those that
oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the
fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his
right, and fear not me, saith the Lord of Hosts."
Here we get the social ideal in the setting most

1 Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Canon, while the Apocrypha is
here in full agreement.

2 W. Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (pp. 27-32).

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 93

characteristic of the last centuries of the nation's cor-
porate life, viz. as projected into the future, the
Messianic age, when by a great divine intervention in
history God shall vindicate in the eyes of all His ideal
of human society. This vindication is usually depicted
as achieved through a personal representative of God.
Marked by a spirit of "righteousness and lowliness"1 —
once the sifting judgment is past — he shall do away
with unjust and oppressive riches on the one hand,
and dependent and hungry poverty on the other.
This is exactly the note of the Messianic Hope in the
Magnificat? which is most significant in the present
connexion as showing the true line of continuity from
Old Testament religion to that of the New Testament.
That line first emerges quite clearly in the great
prophets, whose teaching as to property in a religious
light has just been summarized. Its presence later
on is made manifest in John the Baptist, whose
strongly social message echoes in his replies to various
classes as to a true repentance,3 and whose spirit is
emphatically sanctioned by Jesus Himself. It is a
serious error to overlook this, and to imagine that
He who claimed to fulfil " the Law and the Prophets "
intended, by his new emphasis on the worth of even
the humblest individual man or woman, to supersede,
rather than intensify in its moral and religious sanctions,
the teaching of the prophets as to social justice and
equity.

II

We have dwelt thus long on the Old Testament phase
of the Biblical idea of property, because from the
nature of the case such an idea comes out more fully
in the national story there unfolded than in the New
Testament writings. In particular the teaching of the

1 Zech. ix. 9 ; Ps. xlv. 4 ; Test, of Judah, xxiv. I j Psalms of Solomon, xvii.,
xviii.

2 Luke i. 46-55. 3 Luke Hi. 10-14.

94 PROPERTY iv

Founder of Christianity Himself, owing to its very
genius and historical setting,1 does not furnish much
explicit reference to the subject. Yet it has a vital
bearing on property in its religious and ethical aspects.
The Kingdom of God, the reign of the Divine Will
in and through men on earth, is a conception funda-
mentally social, and casts light upon the principles
underlying every social institution. Hence just as
Jesus confirms certain elements in Old Testament or
Jewish religion, and supersedes others as untrue to its
deeper tendency, as well as inadequate to the idea of
God's Fatherhood which He made determinative of
everything ; so is it with property in the light of the
same idea, even if He does not draw forth all that is
here implied. Certainly that detachment of a man's
heart from all material wealth which He so solemnly
inculcates, and that love for one's neighbour as for
one's self which He makes central in true religion, alike
rebuke all self-assertive claims for " the rights of
property," as if of absolute validity. The Old Testa-
ment doctrine that all a man has, whether of material
or spiritual wealth, he holds as God's property and on
trust for His uses, is assumed and enforced with new
emphasis. " Mammon " or material wealth is en-
trusted to a man's stewardship in order to test whether
he will be " faithful in that which is least," and so be
fit to have entrusted to him " the true riches " of the
soul. " But if ye have not been faithful in that which
is Another's, who will give you that which is your
own" — that is, those possessions which can be made
one's own by the real appropriation of the spirit, to
which they are akin. Further, as regards God's uses
for what He entrusts to a man's stewardship, they are

1 For our present purpose the historical and temporal perspective of Christ's
message of " the Kingdom " as " at hand," is immaterial, save in so far as it helps
to explain why the Gospel at first had nothing to say directly as to social reform.
The social principles involved are intrinsic to the relations of men to God and to
each other, whatever the scale of time or space to which they may be applied.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 95

simply the service of human need for the love of God.
This is tantamount to ministering to Christ, the
Father's special representative — a truth set forth with
special solemnity in the picture of the Final Judgment
in Matthew xxv. 31-46. Persons, then, being God's
one real concern, and their welfare being the end for
which everything which can become human property
exists and is held in trust from God, all life becomes
a proving of loyalty and love to Him through loyal
love to one's brother man.1

" Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, or thou
deniest both his sonship to God and thine own " ; that
is the message of the Gospel for all social relations.
This of course includes implicitly economic relations,
as affecting the well-being of men, and so the degree
to which property may be held or increased, where the
wealth of one lessens the opportunity of others. While
accepting the institution of private property as a
condition of social life, Christianity changed the whole
perspective and emphasis of men's thoughts about it,
and, what is still more difficult, their instinctive feelings
towards it, by teaching the incomparable value of
manhood. In the light of Christ's idea of humanity,
viewed in and through the high and indeed divine
possibilities latent even in those of least account with
their fellows, property underwent a radical trans-
valuation. If the Sabbath, a divine institution for the
training of human life, was yet " made for man," was
relative to his well-being, and not vice versa, how
much more so property ? Property had no rights that
were not relative to this great law of human life, that
everything is to be judged as having the sanction of
God only so far as it subserves, or at least does not
stand in the way of, the Divine idea of man as a being
created for spiritual likeness to Himself. To this end
of ends for man all else must be treated but as means.

1 Luke xvi. 10-12 5 cf. ix. 18.

96 PROPERTY iv

Thus every institution of society is to be regarded as
liable to modification as in practice it fails to work in
such a way as to respect the sovereign rights of God in
humanity, as His chief handiwork and property, and
that for which, as potential sharer in His own nature
and glory, all else was created.

These corollaries of the central Christian duty, love
to God and to man in the light of God's interest in
him — love with the mind and conscience as well as
with the feelings — were no doubt felt at once, so
morally obvious are they. Yet they would be felt in
various degrees of urgency, as their practical bearings
were patent or required more reflection in order to be
realized. The Master Himself had not dealt directly
with economic conditions but only with moral dis-
position as determining the use of these. All, then,
that was at once realized was the duty, or rather
privilege, of " charity," in the restricted sense of that
term, the divine obligation to share one's goods with
those in actual need of bodily necessities, even to the
point of impoverishing one's self in fulfilment of the law
of Christ. "As ye would that men should do unto
you, do ye also so unto them." There was no com-
pulsion to sacrifice one's property at a stroke or to any
given point ; only, such conduct was highly honoured,
as in the case of Barnabas. What did become a part
of the ordinary Christian's ideal, and often of his
practice, was the habit of treating his goods as not
his very own, but as held in trust for the brethren in
proportion to their need. " None said that aught of
the things which he possessed was his own " ; and in
that sense " they had all things in common."

So says Acts ; l and the idea is echoed in the early
Catechism called The Two Ways^ which adds, "For
if we are fellow-sharers in that which is imperishable,
how much more in things perishable ? " Here we

1 Acts iv. 32 ; cf. ii. 44 f.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 97

have the authentic note of primitive Christian faith ;
and indeed it is a timeless conviction of Christian faith
worthy the name. For " whoso hath the world's goods,
and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his
compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide
in him ?" (i John iii. 17). The only point at which
hesitation might arise, and where it did arise during the
early centuries, as in later times, was as to the best form
in which this spirit of boundless goodwill (the social
equivalent of Christian love) should act in any given
state of society — especially outside the special bonds
and guarantees of actual Christian brotherhood. Here
indeed there has been great variety in practice. But
as to the essential Christian attitude there can be no
change without virtual repudiation of discipleship to
Christ Himself, let alone primitive practice. Two
things are axiomatic : first the incomparable value of
persons as compared with property ; and next the
purely relative property-rights of any individual, not
only as compared with God's absolute rights as Pro-
ducer and Owner both of all things and of all persons,
but also as compared with the paramount human or
derivative rights of Society as representing the common
weal. Of this, the individual's weal is only a dependent
part, and should be limited by the rights of all others
to the conditions of personal well-being.

The resulting practical principle, viz. the steward-
ship of property on behalf both of God and of Society,
and the moral duty of fidelity in this relation as the
condition of any correlative rights of private personal
enjoyment, is too deeply embedded in Christ's teaching,
notably in the parables, to need demonstration. But
how thoroughly St. Paul, too, grasped this principle in
all its range, applying it not only to material but also
to spiritual possessions, may be seen from his searching
words to certain at Corinth l who prided themselves

1 i Cor. iv. 7. *

H

9 8 PROPERTY iv

on their mental superiority. " For who maketh thee
to excel ? And what hast thou that thou hast not
received ? But if thou didst receive it, why dost thou
glory as if thou hadst not received it ? " Everything
is a gift of God's bounty, and calls for a grateful
stewardship of love, the primary objects of which are
the brethren, and beyond them all in need. As a
manual of the next generation,1 a sort of "Whole Duty
of the Christian Man," puts it : " For the Father wills
that to all there be given from His own gracious gifts."
The real danger, in the case of the more earnest souls,
was a too indiscriminate charity to every applicant in
the guise of need, particularly where the Jewish notion
was adopted that alms had an atoning virtue (cf. iv.
6-7). But apart from abuses in both directions, in the
motives of receiver and giver, self-sacrificing beneficence
towards every form of need, inspired by an " enthusiasm
of humanity," such as Ecce Homo describes as likely
to be evoked by Christ's teaching and His own attitude
to men, marked the Christianity of the early centuries
and moulded its whole attitude to property.

Most typical is the terse statement in The
Preaching of Peter, a summary of Christian teaching
probably belonging to the first half of the second
century : " Rich is that man who pities many, and in
imitation of God bestows from what he hath : for God
giveth all things to all from His own creatures.
Understand, then, ye rich, that ye are in duty bound
to do service, having received more than ye yourselves
need. Learn that to others is lacking that wherein
you superabound. Be ashamed of holding fast what
belongs to others. Imitate God's equity, and none
shall be poor." This long remained a locus classicus
for the Christian idea of property. Gregory of
Nazianzus,2 for instance, towards the end of the fourth

1 The Teaching of the Apostles, i. 5.

2 Oration xiv. In Orat. xvi. 18, he denounces as "most unjust of all," the man
who keeps to himself " m*uch property unexpectedly gained."

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 99

century, cites its closing sentences, with the preface :
" Let us not be bad stewards of what has been given
to us." Similarly in an earnest call to truer living
issued by a Christian prophet before the middle of the
second century, we read : " Every man ought to be
rescued from misfortune ; for he that hath need and
suffereth misfortune in his daily life is in great distress
and necessity," and " suffers like torment with one in
bonds." Such men, in fact, are often driven to
desperation : hence, to know and not to rescue them
is to be guilty of their blood.1 Or again : 2 " Instead,
then, of fields buy ye souls in distress, as one is able,
and protect widows and orphans. . . . For to this end
the Sovereign Master enriched you, that ye might
perform these services for Him." For the Christian
to do otherwise is to " repudiate," for the sake of
earthly possessions, " the law of his own city," i.e.
brotherly love, and follow " the law of this city " (the
world), viz. selfishness. For himself he should seek
to provide no more than a modest sufficiency.

The tone of the Apologists of the second century is
the same. There is no thought of individual rights
making a truly Christian use of property optional or
voluntary, rather than obligatory, on the lines just
indicated : for " wherein any can do good to his
neighbours and does it not, he shall be reckoned alien
to the Lord's love," i.e. the Christian law of life.3

Further, the ancient Church was very sensitive
about morally doubtful trades,4 and refused to receive
for God's service, especially the relief of the poor and
needy conceived of as God's special "altar" for
acceptable sacrifices, anything made from such sources,

1 The Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude X. iv. z f.

'2 Simil, I. 5-8 j cf. Mandate viii. 10, and the parallels adduced in Harnack's note
in his Patrum Apost. Opera.

3 Irenaeus, Frag. 10, in Harvey's edition, ii. 477.

4 The Apostolic Didascalia, iv. 5-6 ( = Apost. Const, iv. 6), the Canons of
Hifpolyfus, xi. ff. and parallel documents.

ioo PROPERTY iv

or to accept as members those who persisted in such
trades. Among forms of tainted money the Church
reckoned usury, mainly having in mind the poorer
class of borrower in time of distress,1 who could ill
afford to pay the high current rate of interest, and often
fell as a debtor into the power of the lender. The
lending of business capital on terms offering good
chances of repayment was not in question. In the
matter of usury, then, we get a good instance of the
way in which the Christian conscience placed the use of
property under the control of the law of justice that is
also sympathy.

So far we have summarized the incidental teaching
of the Early Church generally as to the duties of
property. But there are a few writers who deal with
the subject more particularly. The most careful
handling of the subject of riches — primarily indeed in
relation to their possessor's true welfare — from an Early
Christian standpoint, is a tractate of Clement of
Alexandria early in the third century. It is entitled
" Who is the Rich Man that is saved ? " in allusion
to Christ's reply to the man who asked " What shall I
do that I may inherit eternal life ? " — " How hardly
shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of
God." These words deeply impressed the Early Church.
Indeed Clement found it needful, even after the lapse
of nearly two centuries, to explain that they did not
shut out rich men as such from eternal life, any more
than they guaranteed it to poor men as such. Yet he
does not disguise the grave difficulties which beset the
rich man in the path of eternal life. He enters on the
Christian race severely handicapped with the weight of
earthly wealth ; yet need he not give up the idea of
entering at all, only he must submit to the strictest
training of all under Christ the great trainer (ch. iii.).

1 Cf. Gregory Naz., Oration xvi. 18, "Farming not the land but the necessity of
the needy."

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OP FRDPERTT \ iibir

Everything depends on the motive, the attitude of
will, "the stripping from the soul itself, and the
disposition, the underlying passions, and the cutting
out by the roots of things alien" (c. xii.). To judge
the task impossible would be to make impossible also
the principle of sharing one's goods with others. " For
what sharing would be left open to men if no one had
anything? " This does not indeed quite cover the
defence of riches as such. But it does tell against
a literalistic and purely ascetic reading of Christ's
teaching as to property, such as was evidently current
in certain circles in Clement's day.

Accordingly the sum of the matter is this : " Wealth
which benefits one's neighbours also is not to be
discarded. For it is c wealth ' as being useful. It is,
in fact, like some material or instrument, for good use
by those who know how. . . . Such an instrument is
riches also. Thou canst use it justly : to righteous-
ness it is subservient. A man uses it unjustly : again
a servant it is found of injustice. For its nature is to
be a servant, but not to rule. ... So let no one do
away with possessions, but rather the passions of the
soul such as do not permit the better use of property,
in order that, becoming noble and good, he may be
able to use nobly even these possessions." To those
who have cast aside the passions of the soul which lead
to abuse of wealth, Christ says "Come, follow me," as
the Way in the use of wealth also.

Such was Clement's view of Christian duty as to
property, even when amounting to riches. It was
not exactly the primitive Christian one, which resulted
largely from expectation of a near end to the present
order of things ; but it had at its heart the same idea of
property, whether material or spiritual, as a stewardship
from God for the good of all within our reach (c. xvi.).
" For he who holds possessions as God's gifts, both
ministering from them to God the giver, unto men's

PROPERTY iv

salvation, and knowing that he possesses them for the
brethren's sake rather than his own, . . . not being a
slave of what he possesses and not carrying them about
in his soul, but ever labouring at some good and divine
work ... he is the man deemed blessed by the Lord
and called poor in the spirit . . . not one who could
not live if not rich " (c. xvi.).

Nay more, man's natural stewardship towards God
is for Christians enhanced by the debt owed to Christ
for laying down His life for them. u This (life) He
demands of us in return on behalf of one another.
But if we owe our lives to the brethren, . . . should
we any longer hoard and shut up worldly things, those
beggarly and alien and fleeting things ? " (c. xxxvii.).
Thus the right use of property is simply the corollary
of love, in the peculiarly deep and real sense distinctive
of the Christian Gospel. " Love buds into beneficence."
Here Clement stands on the old and broad basis of the
common Christian conscience, as we have described it,
and as it utters itself in a Jewish Christian writing
about Clement's own day : l " Every fair deed shall the
love of man teach you to do, even as hatred of men
suggests ill-doing." In contrast to such "phil-
anthropy" stands the self-seeking spirit of greed
(pleoncxia\ which readily attaches to the pursuit of
temporal gain and prompts to doubtful methods
therein.

Clement can find no Christian warrant for the man
who u goes on trying to increase without limit, ever on
the outlook for more, with his head bent downwards "
(c. xvii.). On the other hand, he goes beyond the
primitive Christian mode of thought in a modern
direction, when he observes that " it is impossible that
one in want of the necessaries of life should not be
harassed in mind and lack leisure for the better things,

1 The Epistle of Clement to James (viii.-x.), prefixed to the Clementine Homilies
but probably of earlier date.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 103

in trying to provide the wherewithal. How much
more serviceable the opposite case, when having a
competency he both himself escapes straits as to money
and is able to aid deserving persons." The ideal lot
is, in fact, that happy mean between riches and
poverty for which the " wise man " of Proverbs
(xxx. 8 f.) prayed, as best for the soul's welfare. Yet
Clement does not feel called on to urge that this should
be brought within the reach of all ; that so every man
might have the means of self-expression through the
true use of some property of his own, rather than be
dependent upon the charity of others. But this defect
was common to ancient thought generally, while in
Christianity " charity " was placed on a more ideal
basis.

In Tertullian the primitive attitude to property is
no less manifest than in his great Alexandrine con-
temporary. " We who mingle in mind and soul," says
he,1 " have no hesitation as to fellowship in property."
And what is perhaps more striking, the same spirit
animates Cyprian in the next generation, a period
marked by not a few changes in Christian outlook.
The two men differed a good deal in temperament ;
both were of legal training and spirit ; and yet neither
dreamt of property being held by Christians otherwise
than in trust for God and His interests in humanity.
Cyprian, who had himself set a signal example in the
matter of yielding all to God's uses, discusses the duty
of charity even to such an extent as to make a rich man
actually a poor man, and meets current objections to
such risks. His arguments may not all be sound, just
as his religious theory of this duty is deeply coloured
by legalism and the notion of meriting reward at God's
hands ; but in any case the essential idea of property
as held on trust for God, the Giver of all goods,
is there and influential. To act in the spirit of the

1 Apology, ch. 39.

io4 PROPERTY iv

Apostolic Church in Acts is " by heavenly law to imitate
the equality of God the Father " in the common gifts
of nature, which " the whole human race " should
u equally enjoy." " After this example of equality, he
who as a possessor on earth shares his returns and
fruits with the brotherhood, in being by his free
bounties not only open-handed (communis) but also just,
is an imitator of God the Father." 1

In these brief sentences two ideas emerge which
receive fuller expression in the next writer inviting
notice on a scale similar to Clement, namely Lactantius,
who wrote just before the change in the relations of
Church and State under Constantine. These ideas are
" equality " in the enjoyment of God's bounties, and
the "justice " of the claim of need upon the property
of those who have enough and to spare. To Lac-
tantius in his Divine Institutes Justice is the very
source of virtue ; and its function as " the bond of
Society " is set forth by means of a description of
life in the Golden Age, when men were true to God's
will in giving the earth for the common use of all, that
none might lack. All this was disordered by Cupidity.
Not only did men cease to share with others their
superfluity, but they snatched at others' property,
drawing everything to their private gain. This the
strong further secured by unequal laws for the defence
of their property thus won. Thus justice disappeared,
with its offices of humaneness, equity, and pity, and
was replaced by proud and swelling inequality (v. 5-6).

Such is Lactantius's analysis of the state of things
prevalent in society about him, as it struck his Christian
consciousness ; and the moral roots of it, judged in the
same light, he traces to "the desertion of Divine religion,
which alone causes one man to hold another dear, and
to know that he is bound to him by the bond of
brotherhood, in that God is one and the same Father

1 De Opere et Eleemosynis, 25.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 105

to all.'* It was to restore "justice " as dutifulness
(fietas) towards humanity in each and all, resting on
like dutifulness to " the common Father of all," that
Christ came. True justice, then, as inclusive of all
virtues, has two primary forms. " Piety and equity
(aequitas) are, as it were, its veins, for in these two
sources the whole of justice is contained. Its fountain-
head and origin is in the first of these, all its force and
method (ratio] in the second. If, then, Piety is to
know God, and the sum of this knowledge lies in
practical worship, he of course is ignorant of justice
who has not religious regard for God. For how can
he know it in itself who is ignorant of its source ? "
This conception Lactantius further develops in a
striking simile, according to which knowledge of God
is to the organism of justice or true morality as the
head to the body, the source of life and intelligence
to all the virtues, if these are to exist in organic unity
and vital energy (vi. 9).

The other part of Justice is Equity, that making
one's self equal with others which Cicero calls " equa-
bility." For God, who both produces and breathes into
men, has willed that all should be equal, that is, equally
matched (pares} ; has imposed on all the same conditions
of life ; has begotten all for wisdom ; has promised to
all immortality. None is with Him a slave, none a
master : for if to all the same is Father, by equal right
we all are children. Wherefore neither the Romans
nor the Greeks could possess justice, because they have
had men of many unequal grades, from poor to rich,
from humble to powerful. For where all are not
equally matched there is not equity ; and inequality
itself excludes justice, the whole force of which lies in
this, that it makes equal those who have come by an
equal lot to the condition of this life. The spirit
which recognizes and acts on such equity between man
and man, is called by Lactantius humanitas, which we may

io6 PROPERTY iv

render " humaneness " or " the feeling of humanity."
It is just what the author of Ecce Homo means by his
" enthusiasm of humanity," when it exists in intimate
union with a sense of the Divine origin and destiny of
truly human nature. Such a union is also exactly what
Lactantius has himself gathered from the Gospels, and
he further uses it as a fruitful principle from which to
deduce all social relations. Here is how he puts it.
" I have said what is due to God. I will now say
what is to be rendered to man ; although this very
thing which you render to man is rendered to God,
because man is God's image. However the first duty
of Justice is to be united to God, the second to man.
But the former is called religion, the latter is named
mercy or humaneness ; which virtue is proper to just
men and worshippers of God, because it alone contains
the principle of social life." The chief bond then of
men naturally, is humaneness ; and he who has broken
it, is to be deemed impious and a parricide. On
account of this tie of relationship God teaches us never
to do ill but always good, to afford aid to the oppressed
and those in trouble, to bestow food on those that have
not. For God, since He is Himself loyal (fius\ willed
man to be a social creature. Accordingly in the case
of other men we should think of ourselves as in their
place (vi. 10).

It is only such full and positive well-doing wherever
need exists and one can help from one's own resources,
and not mere abstinence from conscious injury, or aid
given in exceptional crises, that satisfies " that true and
genuine justice" which Cicero dreams of, but "the
concrete and clearly expressed likeness " of which he
regards as beyond human reach. It is just such a
concrete ideal of justice that has been revealed and
brought within the reach of men, according to Lactantius,
in the Gospel of Christ, who has given absolute value
to humanity, as related to God, even in the most

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 107

despised of men. Accordingly, " wherever a man's help
is needed, there we should consider our duty to be in
demand. But in what does the principle of justice
consist more than in this, that what we afford to our
friends through affection, that we should afford to
strangers through humaneness ? And this is after all
afforded to God, to whom a just deed is the dearest of
sacrifices."

" Perhaps some one will say : If I do all this, I
shall have nothing." Lactantius replies that, after all,
the precepts in question are not given to a single
individual, "but to every community (popu/us) which
is united in mind and holds together as one man. If
alone thou art not sufficient for great works, work
justice with all a true man's might. . . . Nor think
that thou art now being advised to lessen or indeed
exhaust thy estate, but to turn to better uses what
thou would'st have spent on superfluities." In any
case God will judge men by the laws of their own
practice.

The exposition of Lactantius has been given thus
fully, because his seems the most explicit statement
bearing on the Christian idea of property and its
duties to be found in the first four centuries. In its
main features it may be taken as also fairly representa-
tive, especially of the Latin West, where the Stoic idea
of " the law of nature," as expounded for instance by
Cicero, remained widely influential. Thus, his principle,
that to impart of one's larger means to those in need
as an act of " humanity," due to those who share with
one's self a Divine destiny according to God's will, is
not a deed of mere charity but of justice, is found half
a century later in the Roman churchman known as
" Ambrosiaster," when he says1 that it is a matter of
justice that a man keep not for himself alone what was
intended by God for the equal good of all.

1 Commentary on 2 Cor. ix. 9.

io8 PROPERTY iv

So far we have dealt only with the more positive
aspect of the Early Christian idea of property, which
while assuming certain rights of private ownership laid
great stress upon the moral duties conditioning its
exercise. God is recognized not only as the real
Owner of all He has made and is constantly making
and giving to mankind, but also as Father in His
purpose touching its equitable use among His human
family at large. But there were certain limitations
under which these ideas for long operated, particularly
the institution of slavery and the absence of a sound
constructive theory of civil society, especially in its
economic bearings.

These defects, which were part of the historical
conditions amid which the early Church's lot was cast,
were the harder for the Christian consciousness at once
to transcend owing to two sets of causes affecting its
own original outlook, the one temporary and accidental,
the other intrinsic. The accidental hindrances were
the expectation of the speedy end of the existing order
by Divine intervention, and the fact that Christians long
formed but a small minority within a spiritually alien
social environment — a circumstance which restricted
both freedom of action and reflective initiative. The
intrinsic causes, on the other hand, flowed directly
from the very genius of Christianity itself. " The
Gospel " being " the glad tidings of benefits that pass
not away," " it aims at raising the individual to a
standpoint far above the conflicts between earthly
prosperity and earthly distress, between riches and
poverty, lordship and service." 1 Such " holy indiffer-
ence " to all merely earthly conditions tended naturally,
especially under the accidental conditions just specified,
to concentrate Christian effort upon rooting the
eternal boon of spiritual liberty in the souls of men,
to the comparative neglect of social and economic

1 Harnack, in Essays on the Social Gospel, 1907, p. 9.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 109

conditions which had to do primarily with bodily
comfort and welfare. Yet it is a mistake to suppose
that Christians were ever indifferent to actual bodily
distress or hardship in others, even if they believed
these things could be overruled to their own good or
to needed discipline. The Church's ideal in these
matters was that of a modest sufficiency, gained by a
man's own labour and enabling him to do deeds of
mercy to others. But it had not yet enough leisure of
soul or mind to direct its thought to the immense
problem of the economic reconstruction of the Roman
Empire. What it could do at once, that to a large
extent it did. It created a fresh spirit, a new atti-
tude of brotherhood and spiritual equality irrespective
of all outward distinctions, based on the inherent
sanctity of human personality as heir to Divine
sonship ; and this was bound forthwith to make all
relations new, and in the end — if maintained in its
original purity of emphasis — to leaven every circle of
thought and action, however ethically remote from
such a dynamic centre. Nay more, it furnished within
its own special sphere, the Christian community, an
object-lesson of its inherent tendencies, on a voluntary
basis, stimulated by a public opinion which revered
such of its members as were devoted and original
enough to carry out as individuals the full Christian
ideal even in an alien social order. Thus even within
the institution of slavery it produced a new moral
atmosphere, especially where the new religious relation
obtained on both sides ; while it greatly encouraged
the freeing of slaves on principle and not merely as a
deed of liberality.

(a) In thinking of slavery, the greatest of abuses of
property rights, perhaps the best approach to the
Christian attitude under the Roman Empire is through
Seneca, who was contemporary with the birth of
Christianity. As distinct from Aristotle, who represents

no PROPERTY iv

the ancient classical view that many men are by nature
destined for slavery and have no right to freedom,
Seneca held that since all men have at bottom — in
what is noblest and most characteristic — essentially the
same nature, this common humanity makes slavery a
breach of natural law or right. Here the significant
thing is that it is the religious element in Seneca's
thought that makes all the difference. It is his truer
idea of personality which leads him to his truer notion
of human rights ; and this is the outcome of his
religious outlook, which thus lifts humanity above a
naturalistic level of valuation and makes it something
sacred, an end in and to itself. Here is the meeting
ground of Seneca and Christianity, and it is characteristic
of the religious view of life, socially as well as
individually. The point at which they diverge, the
less steady way in which Seneca carries out the thought,
suggests the greater power of the Christian idea of
God, based on a more vivid and sure sense of His
personality as revealed in Jesus Christ.

But apart from this difference of moral dynamic in
the teaching of Seneca and the early Christians, their
practical attitude to slavery was much the same. They
bade the individual rise to a sense of spiritual freedom
in spite of outward bondage, rather than denounce the
institution as an altogether illegitimate form of property.
The reason for this stopping short of the full application
of the religious idea of persons was, in either case, ex-
pediency under actual conditions. This was specially
clear and urgent for the Christian community, whose
status, already precarious in the eye of Roman law,
would have been rendered quite untenable, if colour
were given to the suspicion that it meant social revolu-
tion on the part of slaves, i.e. the working class as a
whole. Hence the official Christian policy1 for the

1 E.g. in the Epistle to Philemon, Col. iii. 2Z ff., Eph. vi. 5 ff., and i Peter ii.
11-18, iii. 13-17, iv. 12-19.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY in

brief" present distress " was patient endurance of wrong
" after the flesh" in the power of freedom " in the spirit."
After all the principle of authority in society was of
the Divine appointment,1 and should not hastily be
revolted against, even if identified with what, like slavery,
clearly bore the mark of human sin, as selfishness and
injustice. Where freedom was within reach in an
orderly way, by a master's good will, let it be embraced.
Such seems St. Paul's advice in i Cor. vii. 21, though
the passage came to be read otherwise by many Church
Fathers. Apart from this, Christians had a special
reason for deeming direct efforts to abolish property in
slaves as inexpedient, in their belief that the whole
status quo of society was doomed to imminent radical
change by the hand of God. Indeed it is in this light
that we must regard their thought and practice as to
all property during the period when the primitive view
of " the Kingdom of God " prevailed. On the other
hand, we must notice how later changes in the Christian
idea of property went along with changes in this
determinative conception, that of God's Kingdom, its
nature, and the time and place relations of its realization.
Such historical circumspection will help to save us from
not a few current but grave errors touching both the
spirit of Christianity and its view of property as a legal
and economic institution.

(£) So, too, early Christian aloofness from society was
not in the main due to " other-worldliness " of spirit in
the sense of a dualistic attitude to life under material
conditions, or a bias against normal bodily enjoyment
of any kind. This is totally foreign to Christ's own
attitude to Nature and human life. No doubt there
was an " ascetic " element in His practice as determined
by His special mission, and also in His teaching to
others in so far as they were called to share the urgent
task of preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom as at hand.

1 Rom. xiii. 1-7, i Pet. ii. 13 ft".

ii2 PROPERTY iv

Relative to such functions property was but a clog.
Yet all were not called to " take up their Cross " of self-
denial in the same way : there was a normal life of
labour in gaining for one's self and others the daily bread
which was in no way depreciated. Only superfluity is
regarded as a clogging influence, as it grows to actual
" wealth " and promotes the temper which " trusts in "
riches and their pleasures. And this, broadly speaking,
was also the attitude of primitive Christianity, so long
as it was determined by the Biblical type of piety
proper to its Palestinian home. It was only when it
passed out into the Graeco-Roman world that another
type of asceticism, foreign in origin, began subtly to
blend with the older type of self-discipline with the
positive intent of spiritual freedom, through simplicity
of bodily desires, for service of God and man in love.
But apart from this secondary development, which as
time went on assumed immense dimensions and had
far-reaching issues, the early Christian spirit towards
material conditions was not "other-worldly"; for the
scene of the Kingdom of God was to be this earth,
transformed indeed in such a way as to remove all sin
and evil, yet the material home of a life in human
society not essentially other than might be experienced
here and now within the new Christian community,
with its purified social order. The Lord's Prayer
embodies this conception of the Kingdom unmistakably,
and contains in the order and emphasis of its petitions,
including that for daily bread, the principles of the
new social ideal. The claims of the Heavenly Father
and His will are regulative from beginning to end.
Over against such an ideal of human life the existing
pagan order of society was alien in spirit ; and as such
it seemed beyond the hope of renovation by human
efforts, however inspired, rather than by sudden Divine
cataclysm, of which the fall of the hostile Jewish State
seemed the first stage.

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 113

But this foreshortened perspective of the Kingdom's
history on earth began slowly to recede into the
background of the Christian consciousness, from
the date of the publication of the Fourth Gospel,
with its emphasis on "Eternal Life " as already present
in its essential factors ; and for a time Christians were
sadly perplexed between the older and the newer out-
look. In some circles the transition was quicker than
in others. But the tendency was inevitable ; and
before the end of the third century the estimate of
existing society, as embodying an order that might yet
be leavened throughout, began to grow more positive,
and was further enhanced by the adhesion of the im-
perial head of the State. Thus the sense of the alien
nature of the social organism amidst which the Church
lived and had its being tended to pass away during
the fourth century, as the Empire became more and
more Christian in profession, and paganism lost formal
control of society and its customs, while Christian
bishops gained ever more influence and even legal
authority in the world of affairs and of social custom.
Filled with wonder and gratitude at this broad reversal
of conditions, Christians neglected to criticize economic
and social institutions closely in the light of the Gospel.
No doubt the change tended on the whole to a more
responsible and Christian use of property in various
ways, particularly in the ameliorating of the servile lot,
though slavery as such was not as a rule opposed on
Christian principle. But on the whole a great chance
was missed ; and the social order, remaining at this
crucial point unadjusted to the full spirit of the Gospel
of Divine Fatherhood and Human Brotherhood, came
to react adversely on Christian ideals of property
generally. Broadly speaking, the idea of property as a
social and economic institution really remained pagan
and, so far as embodied in law, Roman in its spirit and
presuppositions.

n4 PROPERTY iv

Nor is it hard to see how this should be so. The
very genius of Christianity laid the main stress upon
the spiritual or the intrinsic riches of the soul, rather
than upon material conditions. Further, the historical
conditions of the Church's life for nearly three centuries
under the alien Empire, as already shown in connexion
with slavery, were such as to prevent the natural
extension of Christian thought from the primary to
the secondary, yet influential, factors in man's concrete
life in society. Accordingly when it would have become
natural, with the changed relations of Church and State,
for the Christian conscience to take upon itself fuller
and wider responsibility for all social conditions affect-
ing the welfare of men, including their mutual relations
as equal before God and called to live as brothers in
co-operative justice and love, it did not rise to the
height of its ethical ideal. There are no signs that
the Church of the fourth century had or tended to
create any new and constructive ideal of social well-
being even for its own members, much less for the
commonweal at large ; while the economic aspects
of the problem in any comprehensive sense lay quite
below the horizon of its thought. That is, it simply
shared the conventional ideas underlying the existing
economic order, and the hand-to-mouth methods of
dealing with its anomalies and evils.

Why was this ? Why did not the Christian
conscience concern itself more with such things, as it
did (within the limits then restricting its action) with
kindred evils in the early days of the Gospel ? The
answer must be, at bottom, that its idea of the Gospel
itself had changed a good deal in emphasis. The old
ethical passion, where it existed, had been diverted in
the interval during which Christians had been largely
shut out from direct influence upon social conditions,
into largely different channels, especially those of
self-salvation by ascetic retreat from the world. The

iv BIBLICAL IDEA OF PROPERTY 115

spirit of moral initiative so characteristic of "faith" in
the early personal sense, the faith which felt able and
bound to " overcome the world," outside as well as
inside its own bosom, was no longer prevalent ; and
so no fresh theory of what the social order should be
made by Christian influence dawned on it in power,
and no corresponding idea of property. Here, most
of all, retreat from the normal social order on the part
of the most zealous souls, in the interests of a monastic
ideal l which meant despair of the leavening of society,
was disastrous both in practice and in theory. It
meant a virtual dualism between true religious life and
duty, on the one hand, and civic and economic life on
the other. The latter sphere was thus in principle left
to go its own way according to its own secular and
selfish laws, as a system outside the redemptive control
of Christian motives and methods, yet a system in
which Christians were involved and for the human
issues of which they could not but be largely responsible.
Such a secession of " the religious " par excellence
could not but hinder the growth of a truly constructive
theory of society, and of property as relative thereto ;
and could not but prevent the rise of a Christian public
opinion adequate to originate and maintain any far-
reaching economic reform. Finally, at the close of the
fourth century, a definite theological doctrine, tending
to support such practical pessimism touching the
possibility of justice, in the full sense, in ordinary
civic relations, added its weight to the negative scale.

But apart from the tendency of the Latin doctrine
of Original Sin, as applied to civil society, to obscure
the sacredness of its essential or ideal ends, the very
idea of the petition "Thy kingdom come, Thy will
be done on earth as it is in heaven," was already
fading from current Christian thought and endeavour

1 Though that ideal itself included communal ownership in place of private
property, as is pointed out in the next Essay.

n6 PROPERTY iv

in any comprehensive social sense. Therewith the
true Christian idea of property passed largely into
abeyance ; nor have conditions equally favourable to
its re-emergence returned since then until now. Is it
too much to hope that our own age, with its conscious
effort to return, through past experience, and in an
historic spirit which allows for the relative elements in
primitive Christianity, to the essential ideals of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ for mankind at large, may take
a long step towards working out the bearings of those
ideals on Property, as a large factor in the task of
social betterment ?

The note of religion is responsibility ; and the
genius of Christian religion, as we have seen, is a sense
of the sovereign worth of human personality as compared
with all else in life. This implies the duty of having all
things in harmony with the interests of persons, not
only in the disposal of wealth and the opportunities it
affords, but also in the ways by which it is acquired, as
these affect the persons employed as means to economic
ends. Between competing human interests in this
sphere God is the supreme arbiter, as He is also the
real creator and owner of all wealth, whether material
or mental ; and into His ears enters the cry of them
that are overreached in the co-operative business of
utilizing His gifts. The unsolved problem, then, for
Christian civilization in particular, is how to do justice as
between persons in the use of the wealth which is now
so adequate in the gross for the needs of all members
of the social commonwealth. The answer to this
problem turns largely on a thoughtfully just idea of
Property and its social implications, matters on which
further data emerge in the course of other essays in
this volume.

THE THEORY OF PROPERTY IN
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY

BY

THE REV. A. J. CARLYLE, D.Lrrr.

CHAPLAIN AND LECTURER IN POLITICAL SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS,
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD

SUMMARY

I. The conception of the New Testament and the early Fathers
represents the principle of the claims of the Brotherhood. Permanence
or the conception, which is represented by the organized charity of the
Christian Church.

We are here concerned with the nature of the theory of property which
lay behind this, as it was developed by the later Fathers and mediaeval
writers.

II. Mediaeval theory founded mainly on that of the great Fathers.
The form of this derived primarily from the later philosophical theory

of the ancient world.

The distinction between nature and convention.

The Fathers held that by nature all things are common, that private
property is the result of avarice, but also a restraint upon it.

Private property is lawful, but the common right remains, and is
represented by the obligation to maintain the needy.

Almsgiving is an action of justice, not merely of mercy.

Private property is the creation of the State, and belongs to positive
law, and is limited by its utility.

Summary of the Patristic theory.

III. The Patristic principles furnish the substance of the mediaeval theory.
The Canonists held that private property belonged to the law of custom

and institution, not to the law of nature.

By the law of nature all things are common, and this principle was
represented in the primitive Church, and in the theory of Plato.

Private property is the creation of the State.

St. Thomas Aquinas's treatment of the origin of property more complex.

Distinction between the right to acquire and distribute, and the right
to use.

In the first sense private property is legitimate and necessary, in the
second sense a man must hold it as for the common use.

The influence of Aristotle on St. Thomas.

Private property not an institution of the natural law, but not contrary
to it.

St. Thomas's theory of the rights of property the same as that of the
Fathers and the other mediaeval writers.

St. Peter Damian's phrase that the rich are dispensatores, not possessors.

The Canonists held that no man has a right to more than he needs,
but recognize that some may need more than others.

St. Thomas's view is the same : almsgiving is an act of mercy in its
intention, but is also a matter of obligation. He goes indeed so far as to
maintain that in case of necessity a man may take what he needs.

In case of necessity all things are common.

IV. Such conceptions are in some ways far removed from ours.

We have transcended the sharp opposition between the natural and
the conventional.

We recognize the organic process of the development of institutions,
and the relation of private property to individuality. But the mediaeval
conceptions are not unmeaning. We recognize the unity of life, and the
truth of the conception of a common right.

This is the meaning of the principle of brotherhood, and is the true
guide to social regulation and action.

THE THEORY OF PROPERTY IN
MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY

THE last essay has drawn out the conception of the
nature of property as it is presented in the Old and
New Testaments and in the writings of the early
Fathers. It is clear that their conception of the nature
and rights of property was controlled by the principle
of the claims of the Brotherhood, and expressed itself
in the administration of help to those who were in need.
This conception never died out in the Christian Church.
It would, indeed, be impossible to deal with this sub-
ject completely without taking into account the history
of charity, or almsgiving, in the Christian Church. In
our day we are, no doubt, very conscious of the great
difficulties which surround this subject, difficulties so
great and serious that there are some who think that
the time is rapidly approaching when this function of
the organized Christian Society must be, at any rate in
large measure, transferred to other organizations. But
whatever may be the truth of this, we should fall into
a complete misconception of our subject if we even for
a moment forgot that the Church, from the days of the
Apostles down to our own times, has looked upon the
help and maintenance of the needy as among the first
of the obligations of the religious life, and that this
principle has been represented by an immense network

119

120 PROPERTY v

of institutions, and by the constant practice of Christian
people.

We are, however, now concerned primarily with the
conception of the nature of property which has lain
behind these habits and institutions ; and this essay
attempts very briefly to set out the substance of these
principles as they were conceived in the Middle
Ages.

The theory of the Middle Ages is founded upon the
theory of property as it was set forth in the writings of
the great Fathers from the fourth to the seventh century,
and it is therefore to them that we must first turn our
attention. As we shall presently see in more detail,
the theory of these Fathers represents not merely th*
influence of the New Testament and the sense of ths
Christian Brotherhood, but is related to the general
principles of current philosophical theory in the later
centuries of the ancient world. Indeed, it has not yet
been sufficiently understood in how great a degree the
intellectual conceptions of the Fathers and of the
Middle Ages take their form and even their substance
from the general thought of these centuries. The
philosophical conceptions of the great Fathers have
always their specifically Christian character ; but the
general education of these Fathers — and they belonged
to what we may call the educated classes — furnished
the forms into which they threw their distinctive con-
ceptions, and, in the matter of social and political theory,
much of the substance of their theory.

If we were to attempt to find a phrase which might
represent the form of their theory, we might say that
it lies in the distinction between nature and convention.
In order to understand this distinction we must bear
in mind that nature, in the later centuries of the ancient
world, means primarily, not the perfection of a thing,
as it does in Aristotle, but the primitive or original

v IN MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY 121

form of a thing ; while the phrase also usually conveys
the suggestion that this primitive or original form has
some continuing superiority over the conventional
institution or custom which has grown out of it ; or
more accurately perhaps, that the natural represents
something essential, which may be modified for practical
purposes by the conventional, but cannot be wholly
set aside. This will become clear as we consider the
details of the theory of property.

The most arresting aspect of the patristic theory of
property is well illustrated by such phrases as those
of St. Ambrose, when he says that nature produced all
things for the common use of all men, that nature
produced the common right of property, but usurpa-
tion the private right ; or again that God wished the
earth to be the common possession of all men, to
produce its fruits for all men, but avarice created the
rights of property.1 These phrases represent the
normal standpoint of the later Fathers.2

What does this mean ? At first sight it might seem
to be an assertion of Communism, a denunciation of
private property as a thing which is sinful and un-
lawful. But this is not what the Fathers mean. There
can be little doubt that we find the source of these
words of St. Ambrose in such a phrase as that of
Cicero, " Sunt autem privata nulla natura,"3 and in
the Stoic tradition which is represented in one of
Seneca's letters, where he describes the primitive life
in which men lived together in peace and happiness,
when there was no system of coercive government and
no private property, and says that men passed out
of these primitive conditions as their first innocence
disappeared, as they became avaricious and dissatisfied
with the common enjoyment of the good things of the

1 St. Ambrose, De officiis, i. 28 j Comm. on P$. cxviii. 8. 22.

2 Cf. Ambrosiaster, Comm. on 2 Cor. ix. 9 ; St. Gregory the Great, Liber Regulae
Past or alls, Hi. 21.

3 Cicero, De officiis, i. 7.

122 PROPERTY v

world, and desired to hold them as their private
possessions.1

Here we have the quasi-philosophical theory from
which the patristic conception is derived. When
men were innocent there was no need for private
property, or the other great conventional institutions
of society ; but as this innocence passed away, they
found themselves compelled to organize society and to
devise institutions which should regulate the ownership
and use of the good things which men had once held
in common. The institution of property thus re-
presents both the fall of man from his primitive
innocence, the greed and avarice which refused to
recognize the common ownership of things, and also
the method by which the blind greed of human nature
may be controlled and regulated. It is this ambiguous
origin of the institution which explains how the Fathers
could hold that private property was not natural, that it
grew out of men's sinful and vicious desires, and at the
same time that it was a legitimate institution. For it
must be clearly understood that they do maintain this.
St. Augustine puts this very clearly in several passages
of his writings, and he represents the general consent
of the Fathers.2

This does not, however, mean that the principle
that private property was a thing contrary to nature
had a merely theoretical importance. On the contrary,
it is, I think, clear that the Fathers adopted this quasi-
philosophical theory so readily, not only because it
may have been the doctrine of the schools in which
they were educated, but also because it fitted in very
well with the traditions which they derived from the
New Testament and the Early Church, the tradition
that a man must help his brother who is in need. These

1 Seneca, Epistles, xiv. 2.

2 Cf. St. Augustine, Contra Adimantum, xx. 2 j De moribtis Ecclesiae Catholicae, i. 35 ;
St. Ambrose, Efist. Ixiii. 92 ; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Comm. on Matt. xix. 9 ; Salvian,
Ad Ecclesiam, i. 7.

v IN MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY 123

Fathers are clear that though the institution of private
property is lawful, yet the claims of all those who are in
want continue to be valid. This principle is admirably
represented in one of those passages from St. Ambrose's
writings to which reference has already been made.

It was the will of God, he says, that the earth should
be the common possession of all men, and should
furnish its fruits to all, it was avarice which created the
rights of property ; it is therefore just that the man
who claims for his private ownership that which was
given to the human race in common, should at least
distribute some of this to the poor.1 It is very sig-
nificant that St. Ambrose treats charity or almsgiving
as an action of justice, and this conception is set out
very clearly by other Christian writers. Ambrosiaster,
for instance, as the previous essay has pointed out,
deals with the matter in a very significant phrase when
he says that this act of mercy, that is, almsgiving, is
called justice, for God gave all things in common to all
men ; he is, therefore, a just man who does not retain
for himself alone that which he knows was given to
all : all things are God's, and God who gives them
commands us to give of them to those who are in
need ; this is justice, that, as it is God who gives, a
man should give again to him who needs.2 And St.
Gregory lends his great authority to this principle, for
he says that, when we minister the necessaries of life to
those who are in want, we render to them that which
is their own, we do not give what is ours ; we are
discharging an obligation of justice rather than doing
an act of mercy.3

This principle, that almsgiving is an act of justice
rather than of mercy, is very significant, and forms a
very important element in the patristic conception of
the nature of property. It is true that the word justice

1 St. Ambrose, Comm. on Ps. cxviii. 8. 22. 2 Ambrosiaster, Comm. on 2 Cor. ix. 9.
3 St. Gregory the Great, Lib. Reg. Past. Hi. 21.

i24 PROPERTY v

was difficult to define then, as at other times ; but we
shall probably not be far wrong if we suppose that to
the Fathers its meaning was very much the same as
that which is expressed in the formal definition of
Ulpian : " Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas
jus suum cuique tribuendi." * To act justly is to give
a man that which belongs to him. When, therefore,
the Fathers say that almsgiving is an act of justice,
there is little doubt that they mean that the man who
is in need has a legitimate right to claim for his need
that which is to another man a superfluity. As we
shall see, this conception became very important when
the mediaeval writers attempted to reduce these prin-
ciples to a systematic form.

One great Father, St. Augustine, has also left us a
detailed account of the more immediate origin of
property rights. Property in his view is the creation
of the State. This is quite consistent with the more
general conception of its origin in the conventional
system of life which men's vices have made necessary.
For the first and most general of these conventions of
men, when they lost their original innocence, was the
coercive State itself ; and as it was its function, from
the standpoint of the philosophical system in which St.
Augustine was trained, to impose some order upon the
chaos of the warring passions and desires of human
nature, so especially was it the function of the State to
decide between the conflicting claims of individuals to
the possession and enjoyment of property.

St. Augustine holds that private property is the
creation of the State and exists only in virtue of the
protection of the State. To some Donatists who, not
unnaturally, objected to the confiscation of their property
in the interests of the Catholics, he replies by asking
by what law they held their property, by human or
divine law ; and he answers the question himself, and

1 Digest, i. i, 10.

v IN MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY 125

says that it is only by human law that a man can say,
" This is my house," or " This man is my slave." It
is the law of the Emperor upon which is founded any
right of property : it is idle therefore for the Donatists
to say, " What have we to do with the Emperor ? " If
you take away the laws of the Emperor, who could
say This is my house, or This is my slave ? 1 In another
place he very contemptuously sets aside the claim of
the Donatists to hold as their property that which they
had accumulated by their labours.2 In other passages
he maintains that the right of property is limited by the
use to which it is put, a man who does not use his
property rightly has no real or valid claim to it.8 It is
clear that St. Augustine regarded private property as
being normally a creation, not of the divine, but of the
positive law, and as subject to the determination of the
State, and limited by the degree of its utility.

If we now attempt to put together these patristic
principles with regard to property, we find that they
represent a coherent system of thought, important in
its practical significance, however inadequate it may
seem when regarded from the standpoint of a strictly
scientific examination of the nature of the institution.

These theories are intelligible only when brought
into relation with that fundamental conception of the
contrast between the natural and the conventional to
which reference has already been made. This view
is the opposite of that of Locke, that private property
is an institution of natural law, and arises out of
labour. To the Fathers the only natural condition is
that of common ownership and individual use. The
world was made for the common benefit of mankind,
that all should receive from it what they require.
They admit, however, that human nature being what it
is, greedy, avaricious, and vicious, it is impossible for

1 St. Augustine, Tract VI. in Joannh Evang. 25. 2 St. Augustine, Epist. xciii. n.
3 St. Augustine, Efist. cliii. 6 j Sermo, 1. 2.

126 PROPERTY v

men to live normally under the condition of common
ownership. This represents the more perfect way of
life, and this principle was represented in the organiza-
tion of the monastic life, as it gradually took shape.
For mankind in general, some organization of owner-
ship became necessary, and this was provided by the
State and its laws, which have decided the conditions
and limitations of ownership. Private property is
therefore practically the creation of the State, and is
defined, limited, and changed by the State.

While, however, the Fathers recognize the legal
right of private property, as a suitable and necessary
concession to human infirmity, a necessary check upon
human vice, they are also clear that from the religious
and moral standpoint the position of private property
is somewhat different. The conventional organization
of life is legitimate, but the natural law is not only
primitive, but also remains in some sense supreme.
Whatever conventional organization may be found
necessary for the practical adjustment of human affairs,
the ultimate nature of things still holds good. Private
property is allowed, but only in order to avoid the
danger of violence and* confusion ; and the institution
cannot override the natural right of a man to obtain
what he needs from the abundance of that which the
earth brings forth. This is what the Fathers mean
when they call the maintenance of the needy an act of
justice, not of mercy : for it is justice to give to a man
that which is his own, and the needy have a moral
right to what they require. We shall have to discuss
the question further when we turn to the theory of
property in the Canon Law and in the Schoolmen.
In the meantime it is clear that the Fathers, while they
develop the theory of property in relation to the
philosophical views of the schools, do still under these
terms maintain the principles which are characteristic
of the New Testament. The new conditions of the

v IN MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY 127

Christian Empire had actually transformed, or perverted,
the original conditions of the Christian brotherhood,
but its principles remained the same.

When we now turn to the mediaeval theory of
property, we find that the patristic principles furnish
much of its form and substance. One of the most
characteristic and representative phrases of the Middle
Ages is that in which Gratian, the great compiler of the
Canon Law in the twelfth century, illustrates the dis-
tinction between the law of nature and custom, or
positive law, in relation to property. By the law of
nature, he says, all things are common to all men :
and this principle was observed by those Christians of
whom it is written, in the Acts of the Apostles, that
the multitude of those who believed were of one heart
and soul. This principle had also been handed down
by the philosophers, and thus in the writings of Plato
the most just state was so ordered that no man had
merely personal desires : it is only by the law of custom
or by positive law that this is mine and that is another's.1

This does not mean, in Gratian any more than in
the Fathers, that private property is not lawful, but
only that it is an accommodation to the imperfect or
vicious character of human nature. If men were
perfectly good it would be unnecessary ; and it is
worth noticing that he looked upon the primitive
Christian community as illustrating the ideal temper,
and relates this to the conception that in the ideal
State things might be so ordered that this private
appropriation of things would be unnecessary. Actually
private property is the creation of the State, and
Gratian repeats the phrases of St. Augustine in which
this is set out.2

These principles are related to, but modified in,
the more developed treatment of the subject by

1 Gratian, Decretum, D. viii. Part I. 2 Gratian, Decretum. D. viii. i.

128 PROPERTY v

St. Thomas Aquinas. He is anxious both to explain
the origin and justification of private property, and
to determine more clearly its limitations. In the
Summa Theologica he discusses the question with
characteristic fulness and precision, and sets out a
distinction in the nature of property which he con-
ceives to be fundamental ; that is, the distinction
between property regarded as a right to acquire and to
distribute, and property regarded as a right to use for
one's self. In the first sense he recognizes property as
legitimate and necessary, because men are more diligent
in labouring for that which is to belong to themselves
than for that which is to belong to all ; because human
affairs will be better ordered if each has his own
particular work to do in procuring things ; and because
human life will thus be more peaceable, for there are
constant quarrels among those who hold things in
common. In the second sense he refuses to recognize
a private right in property, for a man must hold those
things which are his as for the common use, he must
minister of what he has to the necessities of others.1

We shall probably be right in connecting his
defence of private property with his study of Aristotle,
for the arguments in the Summa are closely related to
his notes on the second book of the Politics? St.
Thomas is, indeed, so much influenced by Aristotle's
conception of nature and the State that he is no longer
ready to admit that the great institutions of society
are contrary to natural law. To him the State is a
natural institution, for man is by nature a political
animal, and this principle extends to a great institution
like private property. It is not, indeed, an institution
of the natural law, but it is not contrary to it, it is a
thing added to the natural law by human reason.3

1 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. 2, 2, Qu. 66, 2.

2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Comm. on Aristotle's Politics ii. Lectio 4.

3 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. 2, 2, Qu. 66, 2.

v IN MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY 129

St. Thomas Aquinas's modification of the patristic
theory is important ; how far it governed the later
mediaeval conceptions it would be difficult to say.
Speaking broadly, his adoption of the Aristotelian
conception of nature and the State had little permanent
influence, for the theory of the conventional nature of
organized society was too firmly rooted to be shaken,
even by his authority, and the patristic and Stoic principle
continued to dominate political theory till the end of
the eighteenth century.

When we turn to his conception of the rights of
property we find little difference between the traditional
principles of the Fathers and mediaeval writers in
general and those of St. Thomas Aquinas. There
is an interesting treatment of this topic in one of the
smaller treatises of St. Peter Damian in the eleventh
century. Men who are rich, he says, are dispensatores
rather than possessores ; they should not reckon that
which they have to be their own ; they have not
received their temporal goods merely to be consumed
in their own use, but are to act as administrators of
these goods.1 This is no doubt related to the tradition
represented by the Fathers in passages to which we
have already referred, in which they maintain that it is
just that those who receive from the Lord should use
what they have for the common good.

The Fathers, as we have seen, held that almsgiving
was an act of justice, not of mercy, because the rights
of private property cannot alter the fact that God
meant the earth to furnish its fruits for the main-
tenance of all men. The Canonists, too, set out very
clearly the principle that no man has really the right
to hold for himself more than he needs. Gratian cites,
as from St. Ambrose, a passage denouncing as unjust
and avaricious the man who consumes in luxury what
might have supplied the needs of those who are in

1 St. Peter Damian, Opusculum, ix.

1 30 PROPERTY v

want, and maintaining that it is as great a crime to
refuse the necessaries of life to those who are in want
as it is to take from a man the things which are his.
In another place he refers to a saying which he
attributes to St. Jerome, that a man who keeps for
himself more than he needs, is guilty of taking that
which belongs to another.1 These are far-reaching
principles, but there are some qualifying phrases.
In another place Gratian quotes a passage from St.
Augustine, in which he urges that the needs of different
people vary, that the rich are not to be required to use
the same food as the poor, but may have such food
as their infirmity has made necessary for them, while
at the same time they ought to lament the fact that
they require this indulgence.2

It is no doubt in this tradition that we must
look for the origin of that sharp distinction which, as
we have already said, St. Thomas Aquinas makes
between property as the right of distribution of
things, and ownership regarded as an unlimited right
to use for one's self. St. Thomas maintains that
private property is lawful and not contrary to nature,
but that private rights cannot override the common
right of mankind to the necessaries of life. In dis-
cussing the nature of almsgiving he argues that it
is an action which belongs to love (Charitas) and
mercy in its spiritual character or intention, but it is
also a matter of obligation (in fraecepto) ; for temporal
possessions are indeed private as regards ownership,
but not as regards their use : as regards use, so far as
they are superfluities, they belong to others who have
need of them. He admits, however, that the distinction
between the necessaries and the superfluities of life
depends largely upon the conditions of a man's life.3

1 Gratian, Deer. D. xlvii. 8. 3 j D. xlii. Part I.

2 Gratian, Deer. D. xli. 3.
3 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa TheoL 2, 2 j Qu. 32, i, 5, 6.

v IN MEDIAEVAL THEOLOGY 131

Thus his view of the nature of the rights of
property is substantially the same as that of the Fathers
and Canonists ; but he draws from it a conclusion
which Gratian does not set out, and which indeed he
may have intended to condemn. Gratian, in discussing
the question how far alms may be given from property
unlawfully acquired, quotes a passage from St. Augustine
which severely condemns the notion that a man may
steal from rich and avaricious persons, and give what
is stolen to the poor.1 St. Thomas, on the contrary,
maintains that as human law cannot overturn natural
and Divine law, and as material, or inferior, things
were made to supply men's necessities, if there is
evident and urgent need, a man may legitimately take
either openly or by stealth what he needs, and it is
even legitimate in such cases that one man should take
another man's property to help him who is in want.
In the case of extreme necessity, St. Thomas says,
all things are common.2

Such in outline are the conceptions of property held
by the Christian Fathers and the mediaeval Canonists
and Schoolmen. We are dealing with conceptions
which are in some respects far removed from ours.
In the modern world we have transcended the sharp
opposition between the natural and the conventional,
on which the patristic and canonical theory is based, we
recognize the organic process of the development of
institutions and ideas, and cannot be satisfied with
any treatment of private property which looks upon it
as a mere mechanical contrivance of the State for the
correction of men's vices, but rather recognize in the
development of the individual relation to things an
aspect of the development of individuality itself.

The mediaeval conceptions are not, therefore, in-

1 Gratian, Deer. C. xiv. Q. 5, 3.
2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. 2, ^ ; Qu. 66, 7, and Q. 32, 7.

132 PROPERTY v

significant and unmeaning. We are coming to under-
stand that the development of the idea of individuality
is not to be conceived of as something opposed to the
conception of the solidarity or unity of human life,
but as something which is unmeaning and sterile,
unless it is reconciled with it. The patristic and
mediaeval conception of property as requiring the recog-
nition of a common as well as an individual right,
does really correspond with our experience and our
principles, and we find in the interpretation of this,
under the Christian terms of the brotherhood of
men, the true guide to our regulation of life. To us
also it is clear that it is impossible to assent to the
notion that there are unrestricted and absolute rights in
property. It is true that the existence of private
property is based upon the recognition and protection of
the State, and this is not arbitrary or unreasoned, for it is
related to something which has its roots in the character
and needs of human nature ; but this recognition is and
must be determined in its form and extent by the
experience of what is socially and individually useful
and beneficial. The Christian principle that a man
holds his property not only for his own use, but as
a trust for the good of the brotherhood, is not only
valid in the abstract, but does in the long run remain
the true guide to social regulation and action.

VI

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMA-
TION ON IDEAS CONCERNING
WEALTH AND PROPERTY

BY

H. G. WOOD, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
LECTURER AT WOODBROOKE SETTLEMENT, BIRMINGHAM

SUMMARY

AMONG the various embodiments of the influence of the Reformation,
Puritanism is selected for special study in this essay, on the ground that the
Puritan temper most powerfully influenced the business world. The
conceptions of the rights and duties of property which prevailed among
the early Puritans (i.e. among those who during the century 1560-1660
desired a national church more or less Presbyterian in character) are
subjected to a somewhat detailed analysis. Richard Baxter, who has with
some truth been described as the last of these Puritans, is taken as
representative of the best traditions of his school, and in his Christian
Directory the emphasis is found to fall on the sacred character of the
institution of property and on the responsibilities of personal stewardship.

Incidentally, an attempt is made to question the close connection which
is often assumed to exist between Puritanism and laissez-faire. This
connection is shown not to be so direct and complete as is sometimes
supposed, at least so far as the earlier phases of the movement are
concerned. In Baxter, neither the guiding principle of the common good
nor the duty of government control is ignored.

The developments of the Puritan tradition in the eighteenth century are
next considered, together with the teachings which were under-emphasised
or altogether forgotten in the main body of Protestant thought, but were
welcomed by small groups and Sectarian movements.

The essay concludes with a brief survey of the influence of the
Evangelical Revival.

VI

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION
ON IDEAS CONCERNING WEALTH AND
PROPERTY

IN any attempt to describe the social teaching character-
istic of the Reformation it would seem natural to start
with the work of John Wyclif. Both in point of form
and in point of time Wyclif stands closest to the
great Scholastics, and the transition from Scholastic
to Reformed attitudes of mind might best be studied
in his writings. Yet even in tracing the influence
of reforming principles in England — and it is to
English thought that the present study is almost
entirely confined — the work of John Wyclif may prove
not to be the true starting-point. One general
consideration is of importance here. Though the
Reformation in England owed much to the Lollard
movement, the great leaders from William Tyndale
onwards were not, strictly speaking, Wyclif 's followers.
The great impetus towards reform came from the
Continent, first from Luther and then ' from Calvin.1
Particularly in regard to property, the teaching of
Wyclif found but little echo in the literature of

1 Compare D. Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America, where
the interesting thesis is defended, that English history is not a record of steady
progress, but of spasmodic response to foreign influence. In respect of the Reforma-
tion this is largely true.

135

136 PROPERTY vi

the Tudor period. Even the suppression of the
monasteries, which might be considered as a direct
application of that teaching, was seldom defended by
an appeal to the Oxford scholar. Moreover, Troeltsch
is surely right in classing Lollardy with the many
sectarian movements that marked the close of the
Middle Ages.1 Though in theory Wyclif demanded
" a reform of Christendom, which should embrace the
State and Society/' yet when he sent forth poor priests
who might not hold benefices, but who were to
organize little groups on a voluntary basis, he
practically abandoned the idea of the Church as an
organization coextensive with civil society. Now
Lutheran and Calvinist alike retained their hold
on this latter idea, and similarly Anglicans and early
Puritans, the English counterparts to Lutheran and
Calvinist, agreed in striving for a Christian society
in which State and Church should be coterminous,
in opposition to the sects which conceived the
Church as the separated company of the saints.
It is among these sects that the closest analogies
with Wyclif's doctrine of property are to be found.
Consequently, any discussion of his positions may
be postponed until the main stream of Reformation
thought in England has been considered.

Puritanism is rightly regarded as the most repre-
sentative interpretation of Protestant morality among
English-speaking peoples. The great contribution
which the Puritan temper made to the industrial
development of Great Britain is now generally
recognized.2 In so far as our dominant ideas as to

1 See Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der chrhtlkhen Kirchen, pp. 393-401. This
masterly work came to my notice too late for this essay to derive full benefit
from it.

2 Compare the sketch of the influence of the Reformation in Marshall's
Principles of Economics, 5th ed., pp. 74Z-44, which sets the matter in its true
perspective. The whole subject has been handled more in detail in the writings of
Max Weber and Troeltsch, and still more recently by Hermann Levy in his book
Economic Liberalism.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 137

the rights and duties of property rest on a religious
basis or retain a religious sanction, they seem to be
linked up chiefly with Puritan teaching. This reason
alone might suffice to justify the selection of Puritanism
for preferential treatment in this chapter. But the
choice is the less invidious inasmuch as there is no
great gulf fixed between Anglican and Puritan, so far
as moral instruction regarding wealth is concerned.
Richard Baxter may be taken as representative of the
early Puritans — the men who desired an established
Church more or less modelled on Geneva. As a
moralist, Baxter will be found to agree in the main
with the English Reformers of the Tudor period, and
also with such of his Anglican contemporaries as
handled ethical questions. Consequently, in its early
phases, Puritanism on this side embodies most of what
is distinctive of reformed opinion in England ; while
in its later stage it coalesced with the sects, some of
which emphasized elements of Christian teaching which
the more conservative reform movement was apt to
ignore. A study of Puritanism will therefore bring
out most easily the nature of the influence which the
Reformation exerted on ideas concerning wealth and
property.

The net effect of the Puritan movement on the
use of wealth has often been summed up as the
assertion of greater individual liberty. Under Puritan
influence, it is alleged, the Christian was set free from
the imperfect but perceptible control of the Catholic
Church, and left to take his own line in regard to his
wealth with little advice and less discipline. Puritanism
is the religious root of laissez-faire. Some sentences
from Archdeacon Cunningham set forth a verdict of
this kind. Speaking of the seventeenth century he
says : " While there was a strong sense of the religious
duty of insisting on hard and regular work for the
welfare, temporal and eternal, of the people themselves,

138 PROPERTY vi

there was a complete indifference to the need of laying
down or enforcing any restrictions as to the employment
of money. Capital was much needed in England and
still more in Scotland for developing the resources of
the country . . . freedom for the formation and invest-
ment of capital seemed to the thoughtful city men of
the seventeenth century, who were mostly in sympathy
with Puritanism, the best remedy for the existing social
evils. They were eager to get rid of the restrictions
imposed by the Pope's laws, which it was possible to
bring up in ecclesiastical courts, as well as to be free
from the efforts of the King's Council to bring home to
the employing and mercantile classes their duty to the
community. The agitation against the interference of
the Bishops in civil affairs and the triumph of Puritanism
swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in
the employment of money. In so far as a stricter
ecclesiastical discipline was aimed at or introduced it
had regard to recreation and to immorality of other
kinds, but was at no pains to interfere to check the
action of the capitalist or to protect the labourer. From
the time when the rise of Puritanism paralysed the
action of the Church, and prevented her from maintain-
ing the influence she had habitually exerted, it has
been plausible to say that Christian teaching appeared
to be brought to bear on the side of the rich and against
the poor." l

The measure of truth contained in this interesting
verdict is not hard to discern. The Puritan divines
followed Calvin in rejecting the Canon law against usury.
Some of the early Reformers, like Hugh Latimer and
John Hooper, sided with Luther in his denunciation
of usury and in his detestation of trade. Calvin and
the Puritans found their chief support in the city men,
and recognized interest as a legitimate source of gain.

1 Tract on " The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money,"
pp. 25, 26.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 139

It is true that in this direction they broke down the
fence of the Pope's laws. Perhaps it would be more
true to say, they removed the remnants of a canonical
hedge which already resembled a series of gaps. The
prohibition of usury by the Canon law had become
largely ineffective before the close of the Middle Ages.
In the new commercial circumstances of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, its inherent unreasonableness
was more evident. The inconsistency of the older
position is exposed in the argument of Dr. W. Ames,
a favourite moralist with Puritans, who says : " If a
man buys a farm and takes a rent for it, it is held just.
But what is the difference if he lends the money to
another to buy the farm and gets that other to pay
interest instead of rent ? " l The Puritan only completed
the inevitable revolt from the Canon law, by showing
that the Canon law rested on a misapplication and a
misunderstanding of the Mosaic law, and that the
prohibition against usury had no ground in the gospel.2
In addition to claiming the right to receive interest on
capital, the Puritan spirit secured a further liberty in
the use of capital through the opposition of Parliament
to the monopolies set up by the early Stuarts. Since
the leaders of that opposition were men of Puritan
temper, and since one ostensible justification for such
monopolies was the maintenance of the quality of the
goods manufactured or sold, it is plausible to argue
that the Puritans were indifferent to the endeavour to
maintain the quality of goods by the exercise of public
authority.

" The agitation against the interference of Bishops
in civil affairs " was not a distinctive feature of Puritanism.
When Laud secured the appointment of Bishop Juxon
to the office of Lord Treasurer, he incensed the nobility

1 This passage is from Dr. Ames, De Conscientia (pub. 1631). With it compare
Bullinger, Decades iii. p. 42.

2 For this see Baxter's Christian Directory, Pt. IV. ch. xix. qu. xii.

1 40 PROPERTY vi

in general,1 and established the one dogma on which
Cavalier and Roundhead were agreed at the Restoration
—the dogma which Willian Penn phrases thus :
" Not many good days since ministers meddled so much
in laymen's business." Whether the intervention of
the Bishops would have done much to keep moral
considerations before merchants and manufacturers
may be doubtful ; but the final negative given, to
Laud's policy of strengthening the Church by securing
civil power, closed a channel through which the Church
might have exerted a direct pressure.

The course of events also tended to promote greater
liberty for moneyed men, since, naturally enough, the
disturbance of the Civil Wars destroyed the control of
industry exercised by the Privy Council. A greater
licence having once been introduced, it was difficult to
restore a system of supervision which had been working
more or less in the preceding century.

Above and beyond all this, the Puritan movement
is rightly associated with the growth of individual
liberty. Many of its most distinguished leaders would
have indignantly repudiated the name of democrat,
and would have equally indignantly denounced the
heresy of toleration. Yet Puritanism in its essence
meant an increased sense of personal responsibility,
and an assertion of the right of the conscience, under
grace, to guide the individual apart from king or bishop.
More particularly in its later stage when the Independ-
ents became its chief representatives, the direct influence
of Puritanism made for greater liberty in religion and
politics : it was inevitable that the men who won a
greater recognition of self-direction in religion and in
politics should also establish a fuller measure of
economic freedom. The advocates of toleration be-
came suspicious of Government interference in any

1 See Clarendon, History, Book i. § 206.
2 Penn, No Cross No Croivn, Pt. I. ch. xii. § 8. (Works, ii. p. 141.)

vi AND THE REFORMATION 141

direction. At the same time, the trend towards
laissez-faire under the Commonwealth and the later
Stuarts was at first accidental rather than designed ;
and if the action of the Church was paralysed
after 1640, the division of Church influence, rather
than the direct tendency of Puritan modes of
thought, must be held to have occasioned the lowered
efficiency of the Church in her moral witness on the
use of wealth.1

Sweeping assertions to the effect that the rise of
Puritanism removed all traces of restriction or guidance
in the employment of money, and developed a public
conscience which insisted on labour and sobriety for
the poor, but made no attempt to check the action
of the capitalist or to protect the labourer, are more
difficult to justify. Neither the actions and plans of
the Commonwealth administration nor the published
opinions of Puritan leaders suggest any such indifference
to public control or moral guidance in regard to wealth.

In the first place, though the Puritan generally
admitted the right to take interest, he still regarded
usury or excessive interest as a sin, and as a punishable
sin. If usury is not expressly mentioned by John
Knox in the Scotch Book of Discipline, it is surely
included in the phrase " oppressioun of the poore by
exaction is, deceaving of thame in buying or selling be

1 Certain broader influences would fall to be considered in this connection, of
which the chief would be the rationalist movement of thought so often described
as the Illumination. Dr. Johannes Meyer in his pamphlet, Die soziale Naturrecht
in der christlichen Kirche (p. 33 foil.), traces back to Grotius the tendency to derive
social ideals from a law of nature or reason independent of the idea of God. This
involved a separation between the sphere of religion and the sphere of natural law
which sways the economic and political life of men. " If natural rights have nothing
to do with religion, then religion has nothing to do with the social question." The
Church lost control of business life because the eighteenth century developed a more
secular way of regarding the whole subject. It must also be recognized that the
Puritan distinction between ordinary moral virtue, " the ligament of human society,"
and grace, the essence of the religious life, suggested a similar separation of religion
from economic life. For later Dissent, religion and business tend to belong to
different worlds, which produces the lowered commercial morality of Defoe's
writings. Or if business is part of religion, it concerns the individual, not the
magistrate.

1 42 PROPERTY vi

wrang met or measure," 1 which appears in a list of sins
to be strictly visited with ecclesiastical punishments.
In any case, Thomas Cartwright, who might have been
the John Knox of England, expressly cites usury as a
case for admonition and exclusion from the Sacraments.
" He that hath usurie proved against him, so that he
lose his principal for taking above ten in the hundred,2
yet shall he also, for committing so hainous offence
against God and his churche, to the very ill example
of others, not be allowed to the Sacraments, until he
shewe himselfe repentaunt for the faulte and study
thereby to satisfie the congregation so offended by
him." 3 So far from putting no restriction on the use
of money, Cartwright here accepts the principle of legal
limitation of interest, and would inflict church censures
in addition to civil penalties. Nor is he singular in
this respect. The later Puritans did not depart from
this earlier standard. Under Cromwell, in 1651, an
Act was passed prohibiting any person to take above
six pounds for loan of one hundred pounds by the year.
The Barebones Parliament devoted some attention
to measures concerning bankruptcy, and Cromwell
later put in force an ordinance for the relief of poor
debtors. On the side of personal teaching, Puritan
moralists are never tired of insisting on moderation in
the terms on which money is lent. It is true that
Baxter's counsels in his Christian Directory are some-
what vague, and he does not refer to any statutory
limitation of interest, but he is clear that all usury is
sinful when it is against either justice or charity. In
particular, he holds that the Mosaic law was intended
to protect the poor from oppressive contracts, and the
Mosaic law is in effect binding still, being part of the
Christian law of charity. This being so, usury is

] Hume Brown, John Knoxt ii. p. 144 n.

2 The maximum rate of interest legally established in the reign of Elizabeth.
3 Puritan Manifestoes, p. 120.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 143

sinful, " when you lend for increase where chanty

obligeth you to lend freely : even as it is a sin to lend

expecting your own again, when charity obligeth you

to give it." In the further specification of cases of

sinful usury, Baxter condemns the exaction of interest

on business loans where the borrower cannot pay, and

where the borrower is unable to secure a fair return

for himself out of his enterprise, if he pay the full

interest. From Baxter's point of view, interest could

not be made the first charge upon industry. The

same temper is apparent in the Puritan discussions of

price. Baxter answers the question, " How shall the

worth of a commodity be judged of?" in the following

manner : " i. When the law setteth a rate upon any

thing (as on bread and drink with us) it must be

observed. 2. If you go to the market, the market

price is much to be observed. 3. If it be an equal

contract, with one that is not in want, you may

estimate your goods as they cost you, or are worth to

you, though it be above the common price ; seeing the

buyer is free to take or leave them. 4. But if that

v/hich you have to sell be extraordinarily desirable or

worth to some one person more than to you or another

man, you must not make too great an advantage of

his convenience or desire : but be glad that you can

pleasure him, upon equal, fair and honest terms. 5.

If there be a secret worth in your commodity which the

market will take no notice of (as it is usual in a horse),

it is lawful for you to take according to that true worth

if you can get it. But it is a false rule of them that think

their commodity is worth as much as any one will give."

Baxter is here amplifying Dr. Ames, who also in

respect of necessaries holds that the price determined

by public authority must be recognized as final. It is

noteworthy, first that Baxter had no quarrel with the

exercise of public authority to establish a fair price for

necessaries, and second that he refused to sanction the

i44 PROPERTY vi

sacrifice of moral consideration to the tender mercies
of the forces of supply and demand. In both these
positions, Baxter is thoroughly normal. Both Puritan
and Anglican, in the seventeenth century, agreed on
these points. In view of the first, we may conjecture
that if the Puritans objected to the rule of Bishops
exercised in the Star Chamber and the Court of High
Commission, or if they disliked the control of the King's
Council it was not because they were unwilling to see
moral considerations enforced on moneyed men by public
authority ; it was rather that they denied to King and
Bishop a power of control which they held belonged to
Parliament. The Puritan attitude on a constitutional
issue cannot be twisted into an endorsement of economic
laissez-faire. Nor was there any great breach in the
tradition of national control of industry, in the time of
the Commonwealth.1

1 Hermann Levy maintains the contrary view. He endorses Archdeacon
Cunningham's verdict on Puritanism, and builds his case on the fact, demonstrated
by Miss Leonard (in her History of the English Poor Laiv), that poor relief was best
administered during the personal rule of Charles I., when the pressure of the Privy
Council forced a common policy on the country, and insisted on the raising of local
stocks to give work to the unemployed. After the confusion of the Civil War,
these activities and this policy of the Privy Council were never fully resumed, and
when in 1704 Sir Humphrey Mackworth introduced a Bill for employing the poor,
it was practically killed by the vigorous pamphlet, " Giving Alms, no charity," from
the pen of the Nonconformist Defoe. This abandonment of the early policy Levy
attributes in the main to the anti-social tendency of Puritanism. The system set up
by Charles I. was, under the Commonwealth, " not merely neglected, but it is hardly
too much to say, abolished." The ruling classes' views of poverty had changed.
" The victory of Puritanism brought with it the apotheosis of work," and want of
work meant want of grace (see Economic Liberalism, ch. vi., esp. pp. 73, 77, and
P. 86 «.).

I dissent almost entirely from this plausible presentation of the facts, on the
following grounds : —

(1) The Puritans did not dislike the Poor Law policy of the Privy Council.
Miss Leonard (op. cit. p. 297), referring to the Privy Council orders in the time of
Charles I., says : ** The substance of the orders, however, does not appear to have
created opposition. Men of both sides sent in their reports to the Privy Council
and more energetic measures to execute the Poor Lanu 'were taken in the Puritan counties
of the east than in any other part of England!''

(2) Whatever happened to administrative machinery during the Commonwealth,
the general aim adopted by the Privy Council was not only not abandoned 5 it was
expressly reaffirmed. " An Act for Advancing and Regulating the Trade of this
Commonwealth" was passed in August 1650, and according to the preamble, passed
" to the end that ye poors people of this land may be set on work and their Families pre-
served from Beggary and Ruine . . . and no occasion left either for Idleness or

vi AND THE REFORMATION 145

The attitude of Puritanism towards monopolies,
both in theory and practice, is likewise in line with
Baxter's repudiation of the principle of getting all
you can for your goods.1 The opposition to artificial
monopolies was based on the perception of their
economic wastefulness. Sir John Eliot takes his
stand upon this principle. But in the case of natural
monopolies, the Puritan declared it to be a sin for
the individual to press to the full accidental or circum-
stantial advantages in bargaining ; and they were ready
to invoke arid use the power of the State to suppress
such monopoly gains and punish those who sought
them. Thus, in the first year of the Commonwealth,
the Government attorney was directed to prosecute a
corn monopolist at Ipswich, " so that the poor people
may see that care is taken of them in time of dearth."
Later in the same year, a warrant was issued against
Samuel Truelove of Wapping, and Mr. Bucknell, Ship-
master, "to attend the Council to answer as to a
combination for raising the price of coals." This step
was followed by the appointment of a committee " to
consider how the price of coal for the poor may be

Poverty." The phrase "to set the poore on work" is the regular phrase for the
relief of the unemployed, and it links the aim of the Commonwealth government
with the best traditions of the Privy Council. If work was no longer provided
officially, it was either because the Government lacked the energy and machinery for
the purpose, or because the development of trade after the abolition of monopolies
made such direct provision unnecessary. It was certainly not due to an anti-social
tendency which denied any responsibility of the State for unemployment.

(3) Though Defoe is not altogether typical even of later Nonconformity, it is
certainly true that Dissent tended to embrace an extreme form of Individualism. But
the identification of the unemployed with the idle was not, even for Defoe, a
theoretical deduction from the Puritan emphasis on work j it was grounded on what
he actually saw of the demoralization of the people under the later Stuarts. The
Puritan certainly took a harsh view of idleness, especially among the upper classes j
but he did not confuse idleness and unemployment as Dr. Levy suggests, until the
social conditions of the eighteenth century lent some colour to the confusion. It is
a mistake to regard the Puritan doctrine of work as in itself a factor in changing
Poor Law administration.

1 It is interesting to observe that the protest against monopolies, combined with
a protest against enclosures and bad judicial procedure, is already voiced in Martin
Bucer's De regno Chrhti. Bucer, who taught in Cambridge in the time of Edward VI.,
may be regarded as the founder of English Calvinism. See Troeltsch, op. cit.
p. 776 n.

L

146 PROPERTY vi

brought down, to confer with the Lord Mayor and
prepare an Act." 1 The general principle guiding
such action is laid down in a memorable sentence in
Cromweirs famous despatch to Parliament concerning
Dunbar fight : " Be pleased to reform the abuses
of all professions : and if there be any one that
makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits
not a Commonwealth/'2 Cromwell was probably
thinking of lawyers in the first instance, but the Puritan
did not intend any trade or profession to ignore the
common good.8

To estimate aright the character of Reformed and
Puritan teaching, it is necessary to consider some
broader aspects of the subject. In developing a doctrine
of property, the Reformers started from the Eighth
Commandment.4 " By this commandment, the proper
owning of peculiar substance is lawfully ordained and
firmly established. The Lord forbiddeth theft : there-
fore He ordaineth and confirmeth the proper owning of
worldly riches. For what canst thou steal, if all things
be common to all men ? For thou hast stolen thine
own and not another man's, if thou takest from
another that which he hath. But God forbiddeth
theft : and therefore, by the making of this law, He
confirmeth the proper possession of peculiar goods."

1 State Papers, Domestic, 1649.

2 Carlyle's Letters of Crorwwell, ed. Lomas, ii. p, 108.

3 The sensitiveness of the Puritan conscience on the subject of monopolies may
be further illustrated from the Memoirs of William Kiffin, a wealthy Baptist merchant
in the time of Charles II. In a chapter on his business adventures he is most anxious
to remove the aspersion that he raised his estate by obtaining orders to bring in pro-
hibited goods. He had never taken favours from Government ! See Orme's Life of
Kiffin, pp. 23, 24.

4 Patristic and mediaeval writers usually begin their discussion of property with
an appeal to the concept of natural law, and in the Middle Ages at least opinion
varies as to whether ownership is a natural right or not. (See the preceding Essay.)
The Reformers did not altogether lose sight of natural law, and like earlier Christian
thinkers, they connected the Decalogue with natural law. But to them the Decalogue
is the divine confirmation and interpretation of natural law. From this conviction
they derived a readier popular appeal. The law of Nature was always something
of an abstraction. In starting from the Decalogue, the Reformers based the institu-
tion of property on a direct spoken word of God.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 147

This representative statement from Bullinger may be
supplemented by Baxter's discussion of the question,
" Is it a sin for a man to steal in absolute necessity,
when it is merely to save his life ? " Baxter cites two
opposing doctrines, first that of Dr. Ames who defends
the principle "omnia fieri communia in extrema
necessitate," 1 and then that of the more rigorous
legalists who regard the prohibition of theft as
absolute, because no exception is hinted at in the
Decalogue. Without accepting the latter view in its
entirety, Baxter clearly leans towards it. He holds
that "whensoever the preservation of the life of the
taker is not in open probability like to be more
serviceable to the common good, than the violation
of the right of propriety will be hurtful, the taking
of another man's goods is sinful, though it be only
to save the taker's life." Baxter further maintains
that " in ordinary cases, the saving of a man's life
will not do so much good, as his stealing will
do hurt." He thus appeals to the principle of the
common good to negative the plea "a man must
live," and also to modify or supplement the abso-
lute right of ownership which many based on the
Decalogue.

The early Reformers were led to insist on the right
of private property the more earnestly, in order to
clear their movement of the taint of Anabaptism. The
story of Miinster made these revolutionary Communists
objects of fear. It was felt to be necessary to disavow
their doctrine in the Elizabethan Articles of Religion ;
and accordingly Article 38 asserts that "the Riches and
Goods of Christians are not common as touching the
right, title, and possession of the same, as certain
Anabaptists do falsely boast." The Puritans were
obliged to clear themselves of the same suspicion.
In the controversies of the time of Elizabeth, Whitgift

1 Cf. preceding Essay, p. 131.

148 PROPERTY vi

and Hooker both attacked their opponents' position as
tending to the anarchy of the Anabaptists. Later on,
the Presbyterians and constitutional sectaries had to
repudiate the extravagancies of the Levellers. Thus
from similar motives English Reformers, Anglican
and Puritan alike, found it desirable to protest their
attachment to the principle of private property.
They were anxious not to be taken for social revolu-
tionaries.

Another factor in determining the Reformers'
attitude towards wealth, was the discrediting of
voluntary poverty by the failure of the friar and the
monk. The reaction from the conventional praise of
poverty led the Reformer and the Puritan after him to
insist on the blessing of wealth. Wealth and poverty
come of God's gifts, and either is to be accepted as
from Him. The seventeenth-century moralists do not
ignore the spiritual and moral dangers of wealth.
Indeed they are most anxious to direct the man of
means in the employment of his money. But they do
regard the possession of wealth as something ordained
of God, and in consequence they take up a conservative
attitude towards class distinctions and class standards
of living. They do not anticipate a filling-in of the
chasm between rich and poor, or even a closer approxi-
mation between the two sides of the chasm. It is
assumed to be a natural and divine order that some are
placed in a position to give alms and others in the
necessity of receiving them. Differences in wealth
are incidental to God's education of mankind. " Riches
be chanceable unto us, but not unto God : for God
knoweth when and to whom He will give them, or
take them away again." * In this connection it is
interesting to notice how Baxter, in the midst of many
wise cautions against prodigality, yet reserves the ex-
penditure necessary for the maintenance of class

1 Latimer, i. 478, Parker Society.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 149

distinctions. The answer to the question, " What may
be accounted prodigality in the costliness of apparel ? "
begins with the sentence, " Not that which is only for
a due distinction of superiors from inferiors, or which
is needful to keep up the vulgar's reverence to
magistrates/'1 When, a few pages later, Baxter dis-
cusses how far the rich may spend on themselves
while the poor suffer want, he again rests on the
validity of certain social distinctions, for "it must
be confessed that some persons may be of so much
worth and use to the commonwealth (as kings and
magistrates) and some of so little that the main-
taining of the honour and success of the former
may be more necessary than the saving of the
lives of the latter. But take heed lest pride or
cruelty teach you to misunderstand this or abuse
it for yourselves." In a sermon on the use of
wealth, Bullinger had set forth the same principle.
" One state of life and a greater port becometh a
magistrate ; when another countenance and a lower
sail beseemeth a private person. But in these
cases let every man consider what necessity requireth,
not what lust and rioting will egg him unto. Let
him think with himself, what is seemly and unseemly
for one of his degree."2

Starting from the divine sanction attaching to
private property, to differences in the possession of
wealth, and to the resultant social order, the main stream
of Protestant thought could not avoid the problem
of the use of wealth. If men are not to surrender
their wealth, how are they to make use of it ? Here
the Reformation stressed the religious worth of ordinary
callings, and sought guidance in the conception of
stewardship. Since wealth is God's gift, men are

1 Baxter, Christian Directory, Pt. IV. chap. xxi.

2 Bullinger, Decades, Hi. p. 55. The Canon law was much less considerate
towards this kind of expenditure. See the preceding Essay, and the same writer's
Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, vol. ii. p. 140 f.

150 PROPERTY vi

accountable to God for their use of it. They cannot
evade their responsibility. They must face it.
Differences of wealth and of social vocation are of
God's designing, and men must live soberly and godly
in that state of life to which it shall please God to call
them. They must also remember always the strict
and solemn account which must be rendered in the
day of judgment.

However inadequate the idea of stewardship may
be as a standard of social obligation, and however
readily it may have degenerated into cant later on, it
is to the credit of Puritanism that it succeeded in
persuading many to take their stewardship seriously.
In some instances it resulted in a morbid introspection,
but more broadly it stimulated a healthy habit of self-
examination, strengthened the power of self-control
and the sense of personal responsibility. Men took
more thorough stock of themselves, and the keeping
of accounts became a religious duty — a not insignificant
fact.

Baxter emphasizes the need of reflection in the dis-
posal of ourselves and our resources. "Prudence
is exceeding necessary in doing good, that you may
discern good from evil, discerning the season and
measure and manner and among divers duties, which
must be preferred." And again, " in doing good prefer
the good of many to the good of the few. Prefer
a durable good that will extend to posterity, before
a short and transitory good." This is obvious common
sense enough, but it is part of the Puritan's contribution
to progress that he sanctified common sense. The
significance of Baxter's position may be seen when he
deprecates a close dependence on the momentary inspira-
tion of the individual conscience, and urges his readers
to trust rather to general rules, and adds, " Present
prudence and sincerity will do most." Puritanism
gave a religious impetus to what Sombart calls

vi AND THE REFORMATION 151

" Economic Rationalism," by making everything
matter of conscience, and so of calculation.1

In keeping with the central conception of steward-
ship, great emphasis was laid on the duty of finding a
useful employment for one's self. " Especially be sure
that you live not out of a calling, that is, such a stated
course of employment in which you may be best
serviceable to God. Disability is indeed an irresistible
impediment. Otherwise no man must either live idly
or content himself with doing some little charres as a
recreation or on the by ; but every one that is able,
must be statedly and ordinarily employed in such work
as is serviceable to God and the common good." 2 It
was not only or chiefly in the case of the poor that
Puritanism insisted on the religious duty of hard and
regular work. In the choice of work, cc // is no sin but a
duty, to labour not only for labour sake, formally
resting in the act done, but for that honest increase
and provision which is the end of our labour ; and
therefore to choose a gainful calling rather than another •,
that we may be able to do good and relieve the
poor." 3 Here too Baxter sets his seal to economic
rationalism ! The close connection between the
Puritan ethic of prudence and the spirit of capitalism
is undeniable. A further point of connection is best
illustrated from one of Wesley's sermons. His first
counsel about riches (which in spirit must be judged
by its sequel " give all you can ") is : " Gain all you
can " ; land under that head, he emphasizes the duty
of improving the methods of industry. " Gain all you
can, by common sense, by using in your business all
the understanding which God has given you. It is
amazing to observe how few do this ; how men run
on in the same dull track with their forefathers.

1 Hobson, Evolution of Capitalism, p. 22.

2 Baxter, Christian Directory, Pt. I. chap. iii. grand direction x.

3 Baxter, Christian Directory, Pt. IV. chap. xxi. For this motive in Early
Christianity see Essay IV. p. 101.

VI

1 52 PROPERTY

But whatever they do who know not God, this is no
rule for you. It is a shame for a Christian not to
improve upon them^ in whatever he takes in hand.
You should be continually learning from the experience
of others, or from your own experience, reading and
reflection, to do everything you have to do better
to-day than you did yesterday. And see that you
practise whatever you learn ; that you make the best
of all that is in your hand." * It would be difficult
to imagine a more thorough endorsement of the temper
which has made modern industry.

This insistence on orderly and enlightened industry
in the making of money was naturally combined with
the advocacy of carefulness in the spending of it. The
austerity of the Puritan has been exaggerated. It is
true he did not fully share Luther's faith in the
righteousness of good living, Luther's breezy belief
in the spiritual healthiness of banter and wine. Yet
I do not think the true Puritan would have quarrelled
with Bullinger's view that the necessity which is
supplied by worldly goods does not exclude moderate
pleasures. " For the Lord hath in no place forbidden
mirth, joy and the sweet use of wealthj so far forth
that nothing be done undecently, unthankfully or un-
righteously." 2 It is sometimes forgotten that L? Allegro
was written by a Puritan. Many who scorn Puritanism
as strait-laced could hardly deny that the Puritan
protests against some of the recreations of the sixteenth
or seventeenth centuries were obvious in the interests
of decency. It many instances the Puritan was not so
much a fanatical kill-joy as the champion of good
taste. Thus it appears that the " sad " colours in dress
associated with Puritans in the States, were not mono-
tonous browns and greys, but just the sober shades
which a sound aesthetic instinct preferred to the louder

1 Wesley, Sermon 50, On the Use of Money.
2 Bullinger, Decades, Hi. p. 55.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 153

colours which were then fashionable.1 For all that,
there was a strong ascetic element in the Puritan
movement. The Calvinist was more austere than the
Lutheran, and the tendency deepened, for the Quaker
was more austere than the Calvinist. Baxter laughs at
the Quaker simplicity which rejects ribbons and buttons !
And beyond a doubt, when the life-blood of Puritanism
poured into the veins of the struggling Nonconformist
bodies, there was a narrowing j ust on this side. The
cleft made in English Christianity at the Restoration,
by the Act of Uniformity, brought it about that to the
heirs of Puritanism certain pleasures seemed irretrievably
sinful just because they were characteristic of those
classes of society whose worldliness was most apparent
to Nonconformist eyes, and with whom Nonconformists
came but little into sympathetic contact. Still even
the original Puritan movement pruned men's expendi-
ture severely. If it never meant to remove simple
pleasures (particularly the pleasures of home, which it
manifestly deepened), and if at times it even left the
human heart inadequately warned of the snare of
creature comforts, at least it cut off careless, luxurious,
and dissipating outlay. The Puritan was compelled
to think about the way he spent his money, and he
was led to seek quieter pleasures and to purchase more
enduring objects of delight than the conventional
standards of his day suggested. Yet here too we can
trace how religion nourished, if it did not originate,
the outlook characteristic of capitalism. Karl Marx
says somewhere that " the capitalist brands all con-
sumption as a sin against his function." He would
have uttered a simpler and profounder truth if he had
omitted the last three words. Indeed the three words
in question are only part of the bad habit of regarding
men always from their place in the process of produc-
tion— the prejudice of supposing men's character to be

1 See Maurice Low, The American People.

154 PROPERTY vi

determined by their economic function, which forms
the mainstay of Marxian philosophy. The truth
surely is that the capitalist class was largely created
by men who branded all careless consumption as a sin.
The Puritan conception of stewardship, and the Puritan
condemnation of worldly living, will be found to have
contributed more to the morale of capitalism than either
the love of gain or any conscious adaptation of a class
to their place in the productive process.

Before concluding this brief survey, it is necessary
to devote a few lines to two other points, viz. the
denunciation of oppressive methods of making money,
and the obligation to charity and good works. There
is nothing very novel in Baxter's treatment of these
topics. He has much to say of the relation of land-
lord and tenant — not because he has the Puritan bias
in favour of traders, but because he knew more about
this than about industrial employment. He warns men
against imposing oppressive rents, against oppressing
labourers by withholding wages, and against imposing
oppressive conditions of labour, especially conditions
which render men unfit for or careless of their re-
ligious duties. Indeed it may safely be assumed that
Christian opinion generally in the seventeenth century
would have endorsed the principle of the Trades-
Boards Act. That principle is stated in so many words
by Jeremy Taylor when he accepts as fair price " that
which is established in the fame and common accounts
of the wisest and most merciful men, skilled in that
manufacture or commodity." l If the Puritan did not
take adequate steps to protect labour legally, and if he
trusted too much to the good-nature of landlord and
employer, he was by no means indifferent to moral
considerations in relation to wages and conditions of
employment.

On the side of charitable activities and good works,

1 Holy Living, chap. iii. sec. 3, par. 4.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 155

the Reformers were concerned to urge their necessity
and importance, without admitting their merit. Yet
perhaps the traditional doctrine of the merit of good
works still colours in a measure Protestant discussions
of charity. The following are the motives to charity
on which Baxter lays stress. Doing good doth make
us most like to God : consequently it is an honourable
employment ; it makes us pleasing and amiable to
God, and profitable to men, not only to others, but
also to ourselves, for we are members one of another.
There is, moreover, a singular delight in doing good,
and good works are a comfortable evidence that faith
is sincere. We owe so much to God that it doubles
our obligation to do good to others. Then we are
dependent on others and we should recognize the unity
of the body social. Good works are much to the
honour of religion, are often commended in the
Scripture, and are the standard by which God will
judge us. Baxter's catalogue of desirable works ot
charity is also of interest. He puts first, with an
insight beyond his age, the work of advancing the
conversion of the heathen. The promotion of church
unity, and of a well-educated ministry at home, is
urged as next in importance. After these he mentions
the establishing of free schools in populous and
ignorant places, the providing of higher education for
those who are worth it but too poor to command
it, the distribution of sound religious literature among
the poor, apprenticing poor children wisely, relieving
the necessities of the ejected ministers, advancing small
stocks to set up suitable young tradesmen, the remission
of rent by landlords to encourage their tenants to learn
catechisms, and finally general poor relief. Not only
in this section but throughout Baxter lays great stress
on the service of the State and on the necessity of
studying public utility.

The Puritan position may be summed up as follows :

156 PROPERTY vi

Private property rests on the Decalogue, and the right
of this institution possesses an inviolable and divine
sanction. Differences in wealth and in social status
are of God's ordering, and belong to the permanent
structure of society. Riches, being God's gift, are in
their nature a blessing, and are not lightly to be
abandoned by the individual, though they bring grave
temptations and dangers with them. Since riches are
God's gift, no man is absolute owner : all men are God's
stewards and must render an account of their steward-
ship. Economic wastefulness is therefore necessarily
sinful. Men must make the most of themselves and
their resources. No one has any right to be idle or
careless. It is likewise a duty to use and spend money
profitably, not wasting it in dicing and worldly pleasures
of that kind. In making money, a man must beware
of oppression : in spending it, he must seek for works
of lasting utility to mankind and the Commonwealth.
It is sinful for any one to press to the full the economic
and social advantages of his position, and it is the
recognized duty of the public authority to fix a fair
price for necessaries and to restrain monopolists. A
rightly organized Christian Church would enforce
moral considerations on the owners of wealth by
withholding the sacrament from heinous offenders.

The position, so outlined, is not, of course, peculiarly
Puritan. An examination of the writings of Jeremy
Taylor, or of such a treatise as The Whole Duty
of Man, would have provided equally satisfactory
illustrations of the main points. Jeremy Taylor,
continuing the great traditions of Hooker, eman-
cipated himself from over-great reverence to the law
of Moses. He realized that " amongst us there are or
have been a good many Old Testament Divines, whose
Doctrine and manner of talk and arguments and
practices have too much squinted towards Moses."
This defect of Puritanism the great Anglicans avoided ;

vi AND THE REFORMATION

IS7

but so far as the use of wealth was concerned, Puritan
and Anglican were practically agreed as to their standards
of Christian duty.

It would scarcely be fair to criticize the Puritan
outlook because it failed to anticipate the social evils
of the industrial revolution, though it would deserve
censure if, by its concentration on individual duty, it
rendered men blind to -the necessity of common action,
and perhaps a little callous towards the evils in question.
Undoubtedly later Puritanism had this latter effect,
though other factors of eighteenth-century life also
co-operated to produce it. Many good men of the
Puritan stock were, and perhaps are to-day, attached
obstinately to the principle of laissez-faire^ because a
rooted trust in individual responsibility and self-help is
part of their religious inheritance. In this, Puritanism
displays the defects of its qualities. Such an over-
emphasis compels us to ask what modifications have
been made in the Puritan outlook by changing social
conditions, and what elements of Reformation teaching
have been inadequately represented in it.

Clearly it was from the first open to any body of
Christians who started from the broad principles of the
Protestant ethic to advance beyond others by adhering
to one or two definite applications of those principles.
The advance which the Quaker claimed to make on
the Puritan was largely of this character. While the
Puritan condemned lavish expenditure in general, the
Quaker protested against ribbons, buttons, and other
particular superfluities. While Baxter is nicely balancing
the honour of the magistrate against the life of the
beggar, Fox is urging magistrates and others to lay
aside furs and gold chains in order to relieve the
necessitous who crowd the streets of London. While
the Puritan is commanding honesty in bargaining, and

158 PROPERTY vi

is discussing cases of conscience in regard to the
pricing and describing of goods, the Quaker is roundly
denouncing all the petty falsehood of business, bidding
men have done with all pretended politeness and act on
the simple principle of " So say and so do."

There are many attempts, like that of the Quakers,
to give a more rigorous and definite application to the
common standpoint. Perhaps the chief direction in
which later religious teachers modified the tradition of
the seventeenth century is to be found in the demand
for a greater asceticism on the part of the rich. It
was felt on the one hand that the earlier moralists had
underrated the danger of wealth and good living, and
on the other hand, the problem of poverty became
more urgent, especially towards the latter half of the
eighteenth century. In consequence, some of the
most conspicuous teachers of that age no longer display
the Puritan tenderness towards class standards of com-
fort. Both William Law and John Wesley expected
Christian men to reduce their personal expenditure to
a minimum, almost to live as do the poor. Law's
ideal Christian lady divides her fortune "betwixt
herself and several other poor people, and she has only
her part of relief in it. She thinks it the same folly to
indulge herself in needless vain expenses, as to give to
other people to spend in the same way. Therefore as
she will not give a poor man money to go see a puppet
show, neither will she allow herself any to spend in the
same manner : thinking it very proper to be as wise
herself as she expects poor men should be." " Excepting
her victuals, she never spent near ten pound a year
upon herself. . . . She has but one rule that she
observes in her dress, to be always clean and in the
cheapest things." * Law's standard of living may be
too severe : both Miranda and the poor might be
allowed go see the puppet show sometimes ! But at

1 Law, Serious Call, chap. viii.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 159

least Law does not concede to the rich an indul-
gence he denies to the poor. The distinctive thing is
the assumption that the Christian must practise the
self- denial he expects in the poor. John Wesley
repeats Law's message. In his Journal he commends a
gentleman who cut down his personal expenditure to
twenty- eight pounds a year, so that he had nearly
twenty pounds to return to God in the poor.1 Wesley's
own practice approximated to this standard. Of his
three directions for the use of money, " Gain all you
can," " Save all you can," cc Give all you can," the
third was the most important, supplying the motive
and justification for the first two. Wesley urged his
followers to imitate Quaker simplicity, while avoiding
the snare of Quaker expensiveness. For by that time
the practice of the simple life had become a costly
thing ! " Let me see, before I die, a Methodist con-
gregation full as plain dressed as a Quaker congregation.
Only be more consistent with yourselves. Let your
dress be cheap as well as plain : otherwise you do but
trifle with God and me and your own souls. I pray, let
there be no costly silks among you, how grave soever
they may be." 2 Wesley was aware of the natural
tendency of a rising income to enlarge men's ideas of
what was due to themselves. He knew and denounced
the plea that a larger revenue justifies increased ex-
penditure. " Perhaps you say you can now afford the
expense. This is the quintessence of nonsense. Who
gave you this addition to your fortune, or (to speak
properly) who lent it to you ? To speak more properly
still, who lodged it for a time in your hands as His
stewards ? . . . This affording to rob God is the very
cant of hell." 3

Yet Law and Wesley are still dominated by the
central interest of Protestantism — the individual's

1 The Journal, vol. iii. pp. 312-13, in Everyman's Library.
2 Sermon 88. 3 Sermon 126.

160 PROPERTY

VI

relation to God. The disposal of property is primarily
a question between the individual owner and God,
though God's call has ever in view the wider common
good. The effect of one's conduct on one's hope of
salvation is the main consideration both in Law's
Serious Call and in Wesley's Sermons. Wesley indeed
condemns unhealthy and hazardous occupations, and
also trades which produce social evil. He does not
spare the liquor traffic. All who sell spirituous
liquors " in the common way to any that will buy, are
poisoners general. They murder His Majesty's
subjects by wholesale, neither does their eye pity or
spare. They drive them to hell, like sheep. . . . And
what is their gain ? Is it not the blood of these
men ? " * But, naturally enough, Wesley is concerned
to emphasize the danger to the individual Christian of
engaging in such trades. A man imperils his own
salvation by selling liquor. This is still the upper-
most thought. Wesley has something to say of
dangerous trades — a subject on which Baxter had been
practically silent, because its significance belongs to the
eighteenth century. But the standpoint from which
Wesley comes at the subject is governed by the same
central interest as that which guides the Christian
Directory. Perhaps, in consequence, Wesley " heralds
the temperance agitation, but misses the deeper aspects
of the problem."

When we turn our attention to the sects which
skirmish on the outskirts of Puritanism — its pre-
decessors, its critics and its allies — we are more
certainly in a new atmosphere, an atmosphere with
fresh and invigorating elements in it, which are
inadequately represented in the main current of
Protestant thought. Lollards, Anabaptists, Familists,
Levellers, Fifth Monarchy men and, to some extent,
Quakers, have at least this in common, that they stand

1 Sermon 50.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 161

for and keep alive an element of social hope for the
kingdom of God on earth which does not appeal to
the more conservative Puritan. Sometimes this hope
becomes an apocalyptic fanaticism, as in the case of the
Anabaptists at Miinster or of the Fifth Monarchy
men at the Restoration. But with all their ex-
travagancies and impracticabilities these men preserve
the belief in a new social order, the conviction that
society is to be remodelled as a Christian brotherhood.
The Puritan tended to postpone the New Jerusalem
to another world, regarding this world as a school of
probation that offers but limited possibilities of
progress, or at the most he looked for such an
approximation to the ideal as was apparently possible
within the lines of the existing social organization.
Progress will lie in a further carrying out of the
voluminous advice contained in the Christian Directory.
But perhaps this would hardly build a very satisfactory
Jerusalem " in England's green and pleasant land " !
There is something wanting which is at least vaguely
present in the followers of Major-General Harrison
and John Lilburne, who felt that under the Common-
wealth they were not yet at rest, had not yet enjoyed
or seen enough to accomplish the ends of God.
Surely "the bitter pangs and throbs [of the Civil
War] would make way for that long expected birth
of peace, freedom and happiness, both to the souls and
bodies of the Lord's people : and although we do not
see it fully brought forth, yet we do not despair, but
in God's due time, it shall be so." l In different ways,
the groups under discussion set out to begin forth-
with the new way of living which they felt Christianity
demanded. They very imperfectly realized the nature
of their quest. The increase both in material resources
and in economic knowledge has since rekindled part
of their hope in a more sober form. But they deserve

1 Simpkinson, Major -General Harrison, p. 177.

M

1 62 PROPERTY vi

to be remembered for bearing witness to the revolu-
tionary character of the Christian ideal of society.

The Puritan attitude, then, was marked by the
absence of any emphatic social hope. Two other
defects, or, to use a neutral word, omissions, call for
comment. In the first place, the Puritan seldom
attached much weight to the claim which the poor can
make on the rich in virtue of the social character of all
wealth. As we have seen, when Baxter enumerates
motives for charity, he dwells on the likeness of the
charitable man to God, on the pleasant emotional
effects to one's self of charitable action, on the
assurance to faith and so on. He does indeed touch
on our social interdependence, but he has no clear
perception and certainly no clear statement of any
indebtedness of the rich to the poor. Among the
great English Reformers, Hugh Latimer, so far as 1
know, stands almost alone in recognizing this truth.
If he is not solitary in recognizing the truth itself, the
quaint way in which he establishes it must, I think,
be peculiar to him ! While denying that the poor
man has any right to take money away from the rich
man, he says, in his fifth sermon on the Lord's Prayer :
"But yet the poor man hath title to the rich man's
goods : so that the rich man ought to let the poor
man have part of his riches to help and to comfort
him withal." Latimer proceeds to drive this home in
the following quaint argument. " But here I must
ask you rich men a question. How chanceth it you
have your riches ? ( We have them of God,' you will
say. But by what means have you them ? c By
prayer,' you will say. c We pray for them unto God
and He giveth us the same.' But I pray you tell me,
what do other men which are not rich ? Pray they
not as well as you do ? < Yes,' you must say ; for you
cannot deny it. Then it appeareth that you have
your riches not through your own prayers only, but

vi AND THE REFORMATION 163

other men help you to pray for them : for they say as
well, c Our Father, give us this day our daily bread,'
as you do : and peradventure they be better than you
be and God heareth their prayer sooner than yours.
And so it appeareth most manifestly that you obtain
your riches of God, not only through your own
prayer, but through other men's too : other men help you
to get them at God's hand" 1 The Levellers reinforced,
or rather replaced Latimer's argument, by pointing out
the debt of the rich to other forms of human labour
than prayer. "If a man have no help from his
neighbors, he shall never get an estate of hundreds
and thousands a year. If other men help him to
work, then are those riches his neighbors' as well as
his : for they be the fruits of other men's labors as
well as his own. But all rich men live at ease, feeding
and clothing themselves by the labors of other men,
not by their own, which is their shame and not their
nobility : for it is a more blessed thing to give than to
receive. But rich men receive all they have from the
laborer's hand, and what they give, they give away
other men's labors, not their own. Therefore they are
not righteous actors in the Earth." 2 Latimer uses the
indebtedness of the rich to enforce the obligation of
charity, the Levellers to deny the moral worth of
charity. In either case, we have here a line of thought
which is little considered in the main stream of
Reformation teaching.

Secondly, the Puritan did not press any strong moral
criticism of ownership. He did not regard misuse as
impairing a man's right to property. The teaching of
Wyclif found no immediate echo in the Reformation.
Wyclif claimed that ownership depended on a man's
standing in grace. The sinful man would not truly
own anything. As soon as a man fell into sin, his

1 Latimer, Sermons, pp. 398, 399, Parker Society.
2 Berens, The Digger Movement, p. 173.

1 64 PROPERTY vi

ownership became usurpation.1 This was no abstract
principle for Wyclif. He was prepared to enforce it
legally. He would have justified the temporal power
in taking away tithe from a church which misused it.
His whole general argument leads up to this practical
conclusion. However, it was in relation to the Church
that he was prepared to apply his principle rigorously,
as the Church, he held, was originally meant to be poor.
Some of his followers went further and criticized lords
temporal as well as lords ecclesiastical. As the main-
spring of a legal system Wyclif 's doctrine of property
may seem fantastic ; yet undeniably it is a healthy
stimulant to the conscience. It would not be a mistake
to urge it on the attention of the individual, after the
manner of John Woolman in his Word of Remembrance
to the Rich. In essentials, and yet I suppose in
complete independence, this most loving of revolution-
aries, this late eighteenth-century Quaker, reproduces
Wyclif s position, as is clear from such passages as
these : " Though the poor occupy our estates by a
bargain, to which they in their poor circumstances
agree, and we may even ask less than a punctual
fulfilling of their agreement, yet if our views are to lay
up riches or to live in conformity to customs which
have not their foundation in the truth, and our
demands are such as require from them greater toil or
application to business than is consistent with pure love,
we invade their rights as inhabitants of a world of which
a good and gracious God is the proprietor, and under whom
we are tenants. As He who first founded the earth
was then the true proprietor of it, so He still remains ;
and though He hath given it to the children of men,
so that multitudes of people have had their sustenance
from it while they continued here, yet He hath never

1 A similar conception appears in the Canon Law. See Carlyle, Mediaeval
Political Theory in the West, ii. p. 141. Wyclifs application of the principle to the
Church was the revolutionary element in his teaching.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 165

alienated it, but His right is as good as at first : nor can
any apply the increase of their possessions contrary to
universal love, nor dispose of lands in a way which
they know tends to exalt some by oppressing others,
without being justly chargeable with usurpation."
Wyclif and Woolman are at one in holding that only
a good use of property confers a moral right to it, and
that this moral right is deeper than any legal right, is
indeed the standard by which any legal right may be
questioned or revised. The Puritan in effect did not
go behind the legal right. He did not press the moral
criticism of private ownership which reveals the offence
against love so often and so deeply involved in it.
Consequently the Puritan did not see, and those who
follow the Puritan tradition closely do not often see
what John Woolman saw ; that " to labour for a perfect
redemption from this spirit of oppression is the great
business of the whole family of Christ Jesus in this
world."

This essay must not close without some reference,
however brief, to the influence of the Evangelical
Revival. So far as the Evangelical attitude towards
wealth is concerned, the term " revival " is strictly
apposite. The whole movement tended to infuse a
new spirit of absolute consecration into the old thought
of stewardship. It viewed property not so much in
the light of the Decalogue as in the far more searching
light of the Gospel of the Cross, and of the sacred
obligations it imposes on the Christian conscience.
Thus Wilberforce is unsparing in his criticism of the
average Christian who wishes to fence off the sphere of
religion : " Religion can claim only a stated proportion
of their thoughts, their time, their fortune and influence :
and of these or perhaps of any of them if they make
her anything of a liberal allowance, she may well be
satisfied : the rest is now their own to do what they
will with ; they have paid their tithes — say rather their

1 66 PROPERTY vi

composition — the demands of the church are satisfied :
and they may surely be permitted to enjoy what she
has left without molestation or interference." l He
proceeds to note how the idea of possession as a trust
from God fades from men's minds. This conception
he proposes to revive.

This fuller consecration of wealth was demanded by
the many causes which called for philanthropic effort.
The Evangelicals whom Wilberforce and Shaftesbury
led were alive to the social evils of their time, and
eager to stem them chiefly by voluntary organization.
In the numerous philanthropic societies of the nine-
teenth century, a vast outlet was discovered for the
expenditure of wealth and energy. " Bibles, schools,
missionaries, the circulation of evangelical books, and
the training of evangelical clergy, the possession of well-
attended pulpits, war through the press, and war in
parliament against every form of injustice which either
law or custom sanctioned, — such were the forces by
which they hoped to extend the kingdom of light." 2
The many-sided character of the philanthropic appeal
made Lord Shaftesbury conscious of the apathy of
England, and of the condemnation for sins of omission
to which harmless people of all classes were liable.
This "innocent" world could not face the question,
" Have you laboured for the physical and spiritual
welfare of your fellow-sinners ? " 3

The great Evangelicals were not averse from State
action, nor did they fall into the mistake of sharply
separating the physical from the spiritual needs of men
— a delusive antithesis which often haunts the speech
and snares the thought of Evangelicals, though it is
perhaps as often ignored by them in practice ! 4 But
undoubtedly voluntary organizations, especially for the

1 Wilberforce, Practical Vie*w of Christianity (1797), chap. iv. sec. 2.

2 Sir James Stephen, Essay on The Clafham Sect.

3 See Shaftesbury's Life by Hodder, pop. ed., p. 526.

4 See especially a striking quotation in Shaftesbury's Life, pp. 554-5.

vi AND THE REFORMATION 167

purpose of religious education, formed the outstanding
feature of the Evangelical movement. One character-
istic of this religious and philanthropic activity has an
important bearing on our subject. It has been noted
by Dr. T. C. Hall1 that there was a democratic, a
levelling tendency in Evangelicalism. "To be even
tainted with Evangelicalism was in the early years
certainly, to be socially suspicious. It meant knowing
c queer people ' and going c out of one's sphere in life,'
as the romance literature of the period abundantly
shows us." Evangelical philanthropy overleapt class-
barriers, and paved the way for a more searching
criticism of class-standards of living.

It will thus be apparent that Evangelicalism not
only revived the Puritan tradition of stewardship, and
insisted on the responsibility of wealth in view of the
numberless calls for philanthropic effort, but also
stimulated that practical sense of brotherhood between
men of different classes by which all use of wealth
should be judged and guided.

1 la his essay on the Evangelical Revival in Christ and Civilisation, p. 385.

VII
PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY

BY

THE REV. HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, D.D.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, OXFORD, AND CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH

SUMMARY

THE prolonged vitality of the elemental definitions of property taken over
from Stoical philosophers by Roman lawyers ; passed on through
scholastic tradition ; to reappear in schemes of social contract by Hobbes
and Rousseau. So long as this tradition held its ground, all existing legal
enactments were limited by ideal of Natural Order. Private right of
property could never make itself absolute. Existing law tested by its
power to secure right ; the claim of the poor made in the interests of
justice and not of charity. The tradition was summed up in the phrase
"Property a trust." Over against this, at the Reformation, the rise in
value of individual conscience and freedom. Private judgment sacred
in religion. Individual initiative invoked by new world of thought,
imagination, and adventure. So, in the order of Nature, the individual
was regarded as absolutely free and unchecked ; only to be limited by
contract. Thus, through Locke and Rousseau, the tradition of the Order
of Nature reached the French Revolution in an exaggerated individualistic
form.

Then again, the change and development of industry laid all the
emphasis on the individual. Man free to put out his full force on his
own account, released from external shackles. The result of this
individualism was a tendency to push aside the tradition that private
property was conditional and secondary, and to base it on absolute and
primal right of individual to claim the fruit of his labours. The claim of
others upon him is more and more rested on charity alone. So the fatal
transition came about, which assumed the right of private property to be
final and absolute. This reinforced by Hegel through teaching that
personality requires private property for its full development ; and again
by British practical assumption that property is essential to full citizenship.
The true citizen is a man with a stake in the country. Yet the resultant
society, which grounds itself on the fundamental character of private
property, and finds in ownership the spring of social virtues, has as a
matter of fact so developed as to exclude the great mass of people from the
possibilities of private ownership. Ownership of tools or trade by workers
has been practically obliterated ; and " the people " live on wages. That is,

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 171

it has no permanent property of its own. In consequence, the workers
are without self -direction, without assured stability, and without
independence, all of which are essential conditions for the development
of individual character. Therefore individuals wither under a system
governed by individualism.

Our problem is to correct this unhappy issue. It has been brought
about largely by false logic of personality. Personality has been assumed
to be isolated and self-contained. In reality, personality is never solitary ;
incapable of isolation ; exists only in fellowship, through intercommunion
of person with person. So if personality only can exist in a community,
fellowship belongs to the inner essence of personality ; and every rise in
significance of personality intensifies the significance of society. The
personality that acquires social rights is a personality which is collective
and representative. So in holding private property, it acts as organ of
Community. Thus, once again, private property is shown to be
conditional and not absolute, for it means property privately held and
administered in the name and interest of the community. Again, if
personality is essentially collective, then it can develop through exercise of
collective ownership. The community at large may become an owner ;
and each individual in the community will, as member of the community,
exercise the rights and acquire the virtues of an owner. So property can
be regarded as a trust administered by the whole community, or, if by the
individual, then not by him in his own right, but in his organic, representa-
tive character, as identical, in interest and in will, with the society of which
he is a member, and by virtue of which he exists as an individual. This
ideal identification of individual and society only possible if God be the
one supreme authority over both, Himself the only absolute justification
of all rights of ownership.

VII
PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY

LOOKING back, after this prolonged Historical Review,
it is impossible not to be struck by the insistent
vitality of the elemental conceptions as to the nature
and ground of property, which the Roman lawyers
took over from the Stoic philosophy. From the day
in which the familiar expression given to them by the
writings of Cicero had made them the possession of
every cultivated man, they have never ceased to work
within the mind with which we determine man's
natural right to possess what he can claim to be his
own, and the degree and limits to which Society
should enforce this claim. The particular philosophical
theory by which the language was to be interpreted
might drop out of the world's memory ; but the
language remained imbedded in law and custom, in
formula and proverb ; and, still, there was left on the
corporate imagination the vague impression of a law of
Nature which could be found within and behind all
particular laws, and of a natural right which was the
inalienable possession of every individual man. These
ruling ideals governed the existence and justification of
Property. They passed into the very structure of
human thought through the Casuists and the Scholastics
who did the work of thinking for the mediaeval world.
They took a new lease of life in the schemes of Social
Contract which held the intellectual field from Hobbes

172

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 173

to Rousseau. They were often driven back out of the
arena of practical business by the industrial develop-
ments of the last three centuries, which took their own
stormy way regardless of speculative theories about
rights and duties ; and had to confine themselves to
the domain of academic and forensic disputation. But
they were never dislodged. They could still make
themselves felt at critical moments of legislative decision,
and could still quicken into effective reality high-sound-
ing parliamentary perorations.

Thus, however vague might be the meaning
attached to the historic phrases, they always served to
sustain in life a sense that any existent legal enact-
ment on property had to justify itself at a higher bar.
It was never, in itself, ultimate. Behind it and above
it stood a supreme law grounded in some ideal natural
order of things. Sin and evil might prohibit the
perfect display of this high law. There might be
necessities which justified recourse to lower methods
and expediencies. But, nevertheless, some echo of
this loftier code was the secret of all the authority
claimed by the actual legalities enforced by Society
upon its members. Something of the primal condition
survived, which no after-work could wholly blot out.

There was, therefore, an ideal standard to be
recognized by which all existing legislation must be
judged. The force which a Society could rightly use to
repress wrong-doing and to assert private rights was
not unlimited. Man's outlook travelled beyond it,
and his conscience took in ideal conditions which had
a natural and inalienable authority. In face of all the
violence of War and Conquest, and in defiance of all
the fetters that servile lawyers might be induced to
forge, it was a splendid achievement to have transmitted
this invisible claim of all humanity to a right and a
liberty of which no man-made law could ever dis-
possess it.

174 PROPERTY vn

This tradition overhung the whole structural fabric
of Society, and it applied, with special emphasis, to
the subject which this book has in hand. Private
property, according to this view of life, obviously
belonged to the secondary, and not to the primal,
condition of human affairs. In the state of our
Innocence it would not be needed or authorized. All
would have been in common. This is the constant
refrain of the Fathers. It is true that, by the Christian
Doctrine of the Fall, they managed to get a more
impassable barrier between then and now than the
earlier philosophy had defined. For them, the
condition of Innocence was gone beyond recall ; and
the necessity for restraint, limitation, repression,
coercion was far more precisely determined through
their recognition of universal sin. In this way
Christianity supplied a stronger ground for the
existence of the State, and for the legislation of private
property, than had been possible before. Still it
remained that private property, however inevitable and
justifiable under the condition of an evil world, was
nevertheless only a social expedient, not an absolute
right ; and it was bound, therefore, to be subject to
the possibilities of a higher expediency. It was justified,
but only as the most available method of attaining the
common good in view of present perils ; and it has
always to show that this, its proper end, is being
attained.

This requirement led to two positions which could
be supported by quotations from Fathers and Casuists.

(1) Since, as Cicero had long ago proved, Law
exists to secure the Right, if it fail in this, its original
purpose, it has lost its claim to be obeyed. Bad rulers
and bad laws destroy their own authority. Wyclif had
something behind him when he re-asserted this verdict.
He could quote Augustine.

(2) But there was another position more widely held,

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 175

and more effectual ; and this was that the poor, in
their need, were appealing not to charity but to justice.
The owners of property were, after all, holding what was
due to all ; and in giving to those in necessity they
were but giving them what was their own. Father
after Father had laid this down, often with emphasis
and passion. And the greatest of all the Schoolmen
had endorsed it by his declaration that all which was
over and above our practical wants was in debt to
those who needed its help.

The result of such a tradition might be summed up
in the historic phrase that all property was held in
trust. Those who used it had to answer to God, as
good stewards, for its use. There was no moral or legal
possibility of standing on the bare claim of possession.
The possession of private property was conditional,
not absolute. And its public utility must be justified,
and answered for, at the bar of divine judgment.
This was the underlying assumption which has passed
into our normal historical heritage, and can never
again be wholly lost.

But, in the meantime, during the centuries which
opened with the Renaissance, a vigorous intellectual
development had been taking place, which partly
obscured, and partly countered, this ancient tradition.
Man had set himself to disclose and to discover the full
significance of personality. He was himself, in his
individual character, the seat and focus of all that could
interest or affect him. He was no mere specimen of
a type, no mere item in a class, no mere unit in a
society. Type, class, society, must interpret and justify
themselves to him directly, in his personal and private
conscience. He is at the centre of his own life, not
on the circumference of some one else's. He knows
himself, he answers for himself, he controls and directs
himself — face to face with the God who is his God. So
the outbreak of the Reformation had declared. The

176 PROPERTY vn

individual conscience, the private judgment, had shaken
themselves free from external shackles. Luther had
pitted his solitary soul against the weight of system and
tradition. The emphasis was bound to be given to the
sanctity of individual right, and to the inviolability of
individual freedom. The claim triumphantly asserted
in the domain of the spirit could not but react over the
whole area of active life, wherever personality was at
work. And it was at work everywhere. The earth
had been laid bare to it ; new horizons widened the
range of its possibilities ; new worlds awaited its con-
quest ; its windows opened on to the foam of untravelled
seas beyond which lay " faery lands forlorn." Life was
for the adventurous, for the independent, for those who
could launch out alone and tempt the perilous flood.
Everything conspired to invoke into play the vigour
and daring of individual initiative. A man was asked
to fling behind him the worn-out familiar customs of
social activity, on which lay already the dust of death,
and to let himself go, out of sheer trust in his own
soul, to discover what novel experiences might unfold
their secrets under the conquering force of his own
personal attack. Individuality came inevitably to the
front. The dramatists laid hold of the theme by artistic
instinct. They saw the poetic value of dynamic or
even demonic personalities, impelled into solitary signi-
ficance by the tragic irony of adverse circumstances.
They loved to think of that infinite variability which
gives to human character its bewildering fascination.

The day of individuality had come as long ago in
the Hellas of Socrates and the Sophists. And social
theories were inevitably affected by its invading presence.
To men of peaceful and timid rationality like Thomas
Hobbes, it wore the form of menace. He shuddered
at the thought of a condition of primitive nature in
which he, and those of his kidney, would lie at the
mercy of these exuberant, boisterous, aggressive person-

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 177

alities, all bent on self-assertion. Such a life was terrible
to contemplate — it would be " short, brutish and nasty."
Mankind must, perforce, buttress itself against this
clash and crash of militant individualities by concerted
action, by drawing together to create a community,
which could come to its own rescue under the obliga-
tions of a social contract. So the mass of weaker men
might be strong enough to hold their own against
the overwhelming appetites of masterful individuals.
Under such a contract, they might secure their right
over private possessions.

Or again, as we have seen in the earlier essays, Locke
and the School of English Rationalists gave an intensely
individual turn to the natural rights with which man
was endowed, and laid it down that a man might claim
a right of possession over any material into which he
had put his own individual labour. It was through
this English philosopher that the ancient doctrine of a
state of Nature as a natural law reached Rousseau ; and
it was in this individualistic form that it created the
flaming watchword of the French Revolution.

It was true that Rousseau's own theory of social
contract led him to an admirable organization of a
Social Self, a " Moi Commun " into which the mere
self-centred, self-seeking Ego of Nature passed by a
baptism of the Spirit. The old self was gone, with its
narrow individuality ; and a new individuality had
come into play, corporate and representative by its inner
character, embodying and focussing in itself the mind
and will of the community, finding its own existence
in identification with the universal desire. This is
the true individual who can take up the duties of
citizenship. He is moralized by his universalism. He
lives in others, and they live in him. The right over
private property which he possesses comes to him
through this identification. It is by the will of the
community that he can exercise freely a will of his own.

N

i78 PROPERTY

VII

Here is a noble social philosophy. Only it
depends for its authority on an historical contract by
which men have bound themselves to die to their
natural solitude of being. Yet they could never have
come together to enter into such a contract unless
they had already possessed the corporate and social
character which the contract was invented to account
for. That is the difficulty of all theories of that kind.
The social contract presupposes the qualities which it
is supposed to originate.

But, anyhow, this was not the side of Rousseau
gospel on which the Revolution seized. It flared out
with the bare news that Nature had made man free,
and, yet, that he had made himself everywhere a slave.
He could regain his true self only by throwing himself
back upon his original and primal claim to Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity. Here, again, the liberty phrases
wore the air which had been characteristic of the
Reformation. There might be qualifications to be
made ; but, still, the heart of the matter lay in the free
right of the individual man to break with all authority
imposed from without, and to go his own way, and be
his own master. All men equally had this right to be
themselves ; and in exercising this equality of free
development they will find their brotherhood with one
another. Their natural right was the right to live, to
work out their own destiny, to find food enough and
room enough, in reward for their own labours, on the
broad bosom of a mother-earth which was full and
fertile in response to the demands of her children.
Society might have to collect its coercive or militant
forces in order to assert the liberty of man against
foreign foe or internal oppressor ; and the Revolution
was prepared to commit even extreme power to the
State organization in emergencies. But still the dream,
the vision of the Age of reason and freedom and
benevolence, was one out of which State necessities had

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 179

dropped, and every one was his own law and his own
master, safe in his possessions, assured of his own goods,
glad and at peace under his own vine and fig tree,
fraternally interested in knowing and seeing that all his
brothers had their own individual joy.

Yet, over all this social and theoretic emphasis laid
on the reality of the individual at the Reformation and
onwards, there still hovered the corrective and haunt-
ing memory of that authoritative tradition which went
behind all institutional legalization of private property,
and, from the standpoint of primitive humanity, refused
to attribute to it any absolute value.1 It was other-
wise in the other departments of human affairs, which
had already in the eighteenth century begun to assume
the form which was to develop so amazing an ex-
pansion. Industry had undergone its own revolution ;
and, under its moral conditions, it gave free rein to
this liberty which, from so many sides and for varied
reasons, individuality had learned to claim. Here, in
commerce, there was opportunity indeed for throwing
off external and prescriptive obstacles, and for staking
all your confidence on individual initiative. Here,
indeed, each man counts simply for what he is, and
for what he can make of himself. Here he has a right
to put out his energy in any direction that he can
make good, and to hold in his personal possession
anything that he can win in the open market. Trade
is open and free, and all may take their chance in it.
What he can get, he has. He holds it by virtue of
his own strength and courage and knowledge. In
doing the best for himself, he is accumulating the
general wealth. Let him go ahead, he needs no other

1 It could still shape our prayers. Cf. Prayer in Queen Elizabeth's Primer :
" Thou, O Lord, providest enough for all men with Thy most liberal and bountiful
hand. But wherever Thy gifts are, in respect of Thy goodness and free favour,
made free unto all men, we (through our haughtiness and niggardliness and distrust)
do make them private and peculiar. Correct Thou the things which our iniquity
hath put out of order : let Thy goodness supply that which our niggardliness hath
plucked away."

i8o PROPERTY vn

authority than his own superior skill to justify his grip
on his own winnings.

This was the judgment of the new commercial
conscience. And as a logical result, it tended to treat
the claim to hold private property as final. It gave no
reason for going behind it. There were certain State
necessities which must be provided for ; and individuals,
in return for police protection and public security and
a secured opportunity for doing business, might rightly
be taxed to supply their social needs. But it was the
concern of the State to reduce these to the minimum
by policies of peace, retrenchment, and reform ; and
so to leave the largest possible liberty to the private
owner to do what he willed with his own. Or, again,
it was seemly for those who were well favoured in their
ventures to exhibit a high standard of public benefi-
cence and to aid those less fortunate than themselves.
It was right to rate very high the virtues of charity.
But the very earnestness of the personal appeals made
to the conscience of the rich on behalf of the poor was
itself a witness to the absoluteness of their command
over their property. It depended wholly on their
goodwill whether they would respond, and the appeal
to their generosity could never rise above the level of
an emotional motive.

This appeal to charity, whenever it is greatly in
evidence, is a sure signal that things have got wrong.
It always means that the individual right is treated as
absolute in itself, and has escaped out of its proper
subordination to the demands of justice. The stress
on the duty of beneficence and almsgiving, which Mr.
Wood notes as so emphatic in Puritan addresses and
manuals, is rather an ominous sign. The earlier
theology laid the like stress to a somewhat dangerous
extent ; but, then, it grounded its pleas for charity always
on the supreme justice which claimed the gift as a debt.
But the idea of the debt faded wholly away out of

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 181

the industrial world of the nineteenth century. It
had forgotten that there was any question as to the
right of private property to exist, or as to the con-
ditions of its origin. It had ceased to doubt its
ultimate value. It had its origin, plainly enough, in
the exertions and the capacity of the individual man
who earned it or made it. His right to it was to be
found in his right to be himself. What more could
you want ?

It is this intellectual passage from the conception
of private property as secondary and contingent to the
conception of it as ultimate and absolute, which has
caused all the trouble. And this passage was made,
almost insensibly, through the intense realization of
the value to be set on the liberty of the individual to
live his own life.

From another side, again, the position reached
under the influence of practical commercialism, with
its emphasis on the freedom of the individual to put
out his own powers to full exercise, was reinforced by
the higher Idealism of Germany. Hegel saw in
private property the full opportunity for the develop-
ment of the true ideal individual to which all his logic
had led him. Through ownership, personality realized
its power of self-direction and self-control. Person-
ality is trained, through the discipline of property, to
make its own self-disclosure as a ruling and active
agent in the world of affairs. It comes to itself, thus
realizing its power to manipulate and govern and use
~and direct a permanent stock of effective force. Its
own actuality is revealed to it through this identifica-
tion of itself with the real. It shows itself to be
essentially an end, and not a means. It acquires a
sense of self-centred sufficiency. It establishes its
right to independence. It wins a footing of its own,
a pivot for its action, by virtue of which it can assert
itself as a unit of force in the correlated activities and

1 82 PROPERTY vn

services and functions of the organic community. It
is moralized and spiritualized by being secured in this
recognized position of self-dependent and authentic
reality.

So the big German philosophy works out that intel-
lectual justification of private property which the practical
English man of business expresses by the phrase, " A
man of property is one who has a stake in the country."
He is a qualified citizen whose interests are bound up
* with the interests of the whole community. He has
committed himself, he has taken his place, he has
become a focus and seat and centre of civic obligation.
He has a personality that counts in the sum of the
whole. He has rights as well as obligations. He is
a true ethical unit. For he owns property.

So we all say, and everybody cheers. Thus
"personalty" nearly spells personality. Only the
strange thing is that the very Society which, in theory,
has so emphatically grounded itself on the fundamental
basis of private property, and has found in the sense
of ownership the spring and source of these moral
excellencies on which it builds its own security,
nevertheless allows itself to develop in a direction
which is constantly reducing the number of people who
can have a chance of experiencing what ownership
means. Our industrial organization has found it
essential to its success to wipe out the multitude of small
owners, who once found their place in our trade. It
has stripped the agricultural labourer of all that gave
him a hold on the land. The vast mass of workers
in our towns have long ago ceased to have any right
of possession over the tools or materials of their
occupation. They have dropped to the position of
pure wage-earners, and that means that they have no
secure footing of their own, no self-dependent area
on which to fall back, no reserved resources which
are under their own control and direction. Their

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 183

existence is never in their own hands ; nor are they
responsible for their own maintenance. The stability,
the power to look before and after, the assured hold
on reality, the embodiment of their own wills in a material
fact, which we philosophically recognize to be the
moral and spiritual value of private ownership, — all
this is denied them. They enjoy no sense of back-
ground such as would endow their individual lives
with a certain dignity. They exist on the surface ;
they cannot strike roots, and establish permanency.
The forces on which their very being depends are
wholly out of their ken or power. They are regulated
by others, who are out of sight. They themselves live
by the day or the week, and are liable to every sort
of accidental or unanticipated displacement. It is just
the moral discipline of responsible ownership which
they are bound to lack. This is the class which our
system of industry sets itself to create and use, both
in town and country. Its work is rested entirely
on the wage, and the wage means the absence of
ownership.

And not only so, but the permanent claim made
for the right and value of private property is so used
as to make the many the practical property of the few.
Property is not valued for its use, but for its power,
as Professor Hobhouse has shown. The owner does
not claim what is his own for the sake of using it.
For, indeed, he owns far more than he can ever dream
of using. The unhappy multi-millionaire cannot
consume, through his own efforts, more than £10,000
a year, as one of them dolefully confessed. If his
income is over a million, then all this surplusage goes
to enlarge his domination. What he does is to
exercise power over others. He can prescribe for them
what their life shall be ; what opportunity they will
have for gaining a livelihood ; where they shall live,
and under what conditions. He has thousands upon

184 PROPERTY vii

thousands dependent on him for their existence. He
utilizes their labour, and turns it to efficient exercise and
profit. His private property gives him the power by
which others are deprived of their possession of them-
selves. Thus the great capitalist, by the exercise of his
own right of ownership, limits and cancels the self-owner-
ship which others might enjoy. Himself the great
illustration of the capacities of private property, he is
also, by that very fact, the great example of its destruction.
By enlarging his own immense stake in the country,
he creates a multitude of individual workers who have
no permanent stake to speak of. The property which
gives him such efficient power, does so by depriving
others of the very power which he possesses — the power
to be their own master and to control their own destiny.
Thus it has come about that the Society which boasts
of its reliance on the freedom of individual self-develop-
ment nevertheless allows only a limited proportion of
its individual members to possess the freedom. It
appeals to the moralizing influence of ownership ; and
then denies the possibilities of any real ownership to
the main mass of its members.

Individualism, then, finds its worst opportunity in
an individualistic society. The law of competition,
working under our present capitalism, while offering
scope and fulfilment to the very few, wrecks and
undermines the individuality of the many. And
this it does just because it gives to so very few
the chance of embodying the permanent worth of
the personality in any enduring right of possession.
It leaves the vast multitude of workers to become
mere items on the surface, without any secured future,
without any sure grip on facts, without any stored
reserve, without any established status. Personal value
finds no public witness. Character has no firm pivot
round which it can build up its fabric. The inner
life misses its outer support. It obtains no substantial

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 185

recognition ; it cannot give public or visible evidence
why it should be acknowledged and honoured. It
has no pledge to proffer of its own permanence. It
has no fixed centre round which associations and
relations and obligations may coalesce. It lacks the
basis out of which it can educate itself into structural
coherence, or through which it can respond and react
in counter-play to all the forces that tell upon it from
without.

All this the human personality requires, if it is to
discover its strength and to develop its capacities. All
this it could gain out of the exercise of ownership, in
a community of owners. All this it is bound to miss
in a community in which real ownership is the excep-
tion, and only the few can attain to the full liberty and
independence of self-possession.

By forcing Individualism, then, we have, some-
how, evicted individualities. By over-assertion of the
absolute right of the individual man to have what is his
own, we have landed ourselves in a situation in which
the majority of men are not their own masters, and have
a minimum of what they can call their own. Obviously,
our logic has gone wrong somehow.

Shall we try to see how the trouble began ? And,
reviewing the last three centuries of our social evolu-
tion, shall we not be justified in suspecting that it is
our philosophy of personality which has been at fault ?

We laid hold, at the Reformation and the Revolution,
on the supreme value of personality ; and we found
the secret of this value to lie in the sanctity and
freedom of the individual man. We isolated this core
of individuality ; and we attributed to it, in its isolation,
all its high privileges and prerogatives, all its sacred
rights and inveterate claims. The individual man
justified himself. He constituted his own natural
right to live, to grow, to put out his powers. He
was the spring of his own liberty, and the owner of

1 86 PROPERTY vn

his own activity. He, in his solitary dignity of being,
answered for himself to God alone. He owned no other
lordship. To Him alone was he bound to give account
of his stewardship over His goods.

But can an individuality ever be isolated ? Was
this not a false start ? What is individuality ? And
where is it to be found ? Can it appear, can it
exist, except in a community of which it is the re-
presentative organ ? The individual man draws all his
significance out of the fact that he is the expression of
some social body to which he belongs. He is a
member of his race, of his nation ; on that depends
in fact his individual worth. This is why he counts.
He is a sample of what his nationality means. Every
claim that he makes for himself can be made in pressing
the same terms for others. He cannot give himself
any value that he denies to others. As he rises into
free self-assertion, so these others rise all round him
with identical rights. He and they are created by the
same act and under the same law. He can never be
intelligible except in terms which include and involve
others. Individuality, then, is really representative, is
corporate, is social, by the very principle of its life. It
can only be understood as the unit of a society.

And this only leads us down deeper into the root-
conception of personality which finds expression in
individuality. Personality lies in the relation of person
to person. A personality is what it is only by virtue
of its power to transcend itself and to enter into the
life of another. It lives by interpenetration, by inter-
course, by communion. Its power of life is love.
There is no such thing as a solitary, isolated person.
A self-contained personality is a contradiction in terms.
What we mean by personality is a capacity for inter-
course, a capacity for retaining self-identity by and
through identification with others — a capacity for friend-
ship, for communion, for fellowship. Hence the true

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 187

logic of personality compels us to discover the man's
personal worth in the inherent necessity of a society
in which it is realized. Society is, simply, the ex-
pression of the social inter-communion of spirit with
spirit which constitutes what we mean by personality.
Fellowship and Individuality are correlative terms.

It is therefore impossible to emphasize the reality
of personal existence and personal claims, or personal
liberty, without in the very same breath asserting the
emphatic reality of social obligation, the paramount
authority of social order, the sanctity of social law.
Every rise in the value of the State involves a corre-
sponding rise in the value of the individual that incor-
porates it. Every increase in the personal freedom
witnesses to the supreme significance of the common life
of which that liberty is the witness and the expression.

Personality, then, is always collective in basis. In
every individual act and word it is putting out power
which comes to it through its place in the community.
The " moi " which asserts its free individuality is still
the " moi commun " of Rousseau. It may legitimately
claim the right to personal possession : but the claim so
made will belong to it by virtue of its corporate and
representative qualification ; so that the individual right
to own private property is an expression of the com-
munity's right to have and to hold its own, put out
through the person of one of its members. It can never
be an absolute right inherent in the man himself ; for
he, as a personality, is inseparable from the fellowship
which constitutes his personal existence. He holds
what he can call his own by virtue of his status
inside the fellowship ; and, if so, the justification of
his private ownership must always be found in the
welfare and the will of the community. He must
be expressing the will of the State in having personal
authority to administer this or that possession. He
can never claim to be outside or beyond the range

1 88 PROPERTY vii

of this general will, for only through it can he be
what he is.

Once again, then, we have renewed the supremacy
of justice over all conditions under which private
property is held. It is as a member of the Body
that he has right of possession ; and, therefore, all
his right of possession is governed by the good of
the Body, which is his own good. Any demands on
his private purse, which the general welfare renders
expedient, are not invasions of his personal wealth, nor
drafts upon his charity ; they are the acts of that
identical justice by which he is qualified to be an
owner. His personality is not repressed or curtailed
by being subject to those social demands ; for the
existence of those social demands is involved in his
personality. It is not a conflict between his private
interest and that of the State ; for he is himself a citizen
in the State, and its interests are his. If he disputes
any demand made upon him, it will be on the ground
that the interest of the State will be injured by its
insistence. The State itself is interested for its own
sake in seeing to it that his interests are not injured.

Nor is it only private property that is thus brought
into ethical subordination to the needs of social justice,
but also new possibilities of ownership are laid open
through the recognition of the collective element in
personality. For if personality be representative and
collective, then it may find its field of exercise and
realization through collective ownership. Men may
win the moral qualities which the sense of property
evokes, by owning things in common.

We have, indeed, seen this happen to the wage-
earners by virtue of their Trade Unions. For while
the wage system tends to reduce actual ownership to
a minimum, and deprives the main mass of the in-
dustrial population of that sense of permanent private
property which, economically, it rates so highly, never-

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 189

theless the workers have contrived, through massing
their small subscriptions, to build up Unions with big
funds in reserve ; and, with the help of this accumulated
support, they have recaptured much of the moral force
which is embodied in ownership. They gain stability,
for instance ; they can look before and after. They
can secure some control over their own life-conditions.
They can get their own will expressed and realized.
They can exercise self- responsibility. They have
reserves on which to draw ; and are not at the mercy
of temporary emergencies, or casual accidents. They
can feel ground under them. They stand on their
own feet. They are conscious of some independence.
They have a recognized place in the world of affairs,
and can make good their claims on existence. They
are themselves established and rooted amidst the
theory of things, through their corporate organization,
and their certified holding. All this is the condition
that we associate with the status of ownership ;
and every individual member of a strong Union
thus acquires something of the worth and the
dignity with which a man of property is endowed.
Collectively, he has the moral stability of ownership ;
and if he has become aware of the true character of
his personality, then he will gladly find for it its
adequate expression by means of this collective owner-
ship. He will not want his consciousness of property
to be more definitely individualized. He will enjoy
the sense of ownership as much in its public as in its
private form. For his inner personal life is expressed
as fully in the one as in the other. Thus the privilege
of ownership may be expanded over all those workers
who are organized into permanent and effective
Trade Unions.

And the principle might be carried much further.
Through all the volume of factory legislation the
Nation is exerting her right of self- ownership.

190 PROPERTY vn

Through it she directs her own destiny ; she brings
herself into possession of her own affairs ; she exer-
cises her right of self-responsibility ; she makes her
will felt through material expression ; she embodies
in solid fact her sovereign self-control ; for, as she
thus governs her life by intention, she makes this
earth her own. The entire Body, then, collectively
asserts its power of ownership through the Legislature.
The moral stability and independence which pro-
perty legitimately secures are constituted national
possessions ; while every individual citizen, who is
conscious of what his citizenship means, gains, so far,
the ethical value of a collective owner. He is moralized
by such self-possession, mediated for him through
his membership in the State.

It is beyond the purpose of this essay to discuss how
far this collective ownership will carry us. It is
enough to have shown that, in it, lies the most avail-
able correction of that ironical paradox by which an
exaggerated notion of the absolute value of private
property has led a Society based on individualism to
confine the range of this value within a limited circle.

Obviously, if ownership has the virtues ascribed to
it, then it ought to be extended to all. It ought to
be included in the universal conditions of citizen-
ship. This is only possible if collective ownership can
come into play over and beyond the area which
private ownership can cover, and so can spread out,
for the many, the opportunity which our present
system confines to the few. And this will depend
on how far collective ownership can work upon the
individual conscience and imagination with the same
force as we now attribute to private proprietorship.
The confidence with which we meet this last inquiry
will depend entirely on our psychological estimate
of personality. If anything of what we have said be
true, then personality, which is inherently represent-

vii PROPERTY AND PERSONALITY 191

ative, will find its real and rich and effective realization
under the terms of collective life. Collective ownership
will be an adequate and joyful expression of its inner
character and being. We shall be able to translate the old
phrase, which declared private property to be a trust for
which we shall give account to God, in a new sense.
We had haggled over the apparent individualism of
such a conception. It omitted all reference to a
community. It left the individual alone with God, to
answer simply for himself. His fellows had no
direct authority to review or decide what his exercise
of his trust should be. But, now, we see that the
trust that we speak of is a corporate trust. He
holds it in and with his fellows. The personality which
is answerable to God for its proper exercise of the
trust, has its inherent existence in a fellowship, and,
out of the fellowship, it has no authority to act. The
trust is a common act. The fellowship is in trust
for all that it holds ; and the individual, only as organ
and instrument of the fellowship. He can be called
upon to fulfil the charges for which the community
makes itself responsible in the discharge of its trust.
It is not a secret affair between him and his God, how
he administers his goods. The community can thus
require of him whatever it needs in order to justify its
own administration of its resources before the bar of
God. His right of possession, his use of his own, are
always relative to the larger trust within which he acts.
And, yet further, if he is to identify his personal
claim with the claim of the fellowship he must have
the assurance that the fellowship is not arbitrary or
absolute in the demands that it makes upon him.
And this assurance he can only have if the exercise
of its ownership by the fellowship, within which his
own right of ownership is exercised, be itself the
expression of that absolute ownership which is the sole
prerogative of the God Who made the earth and all

192 PROPERTY vii

that is in it. Back to God all rights run. Back in Him,
the ultimate Creator, producing and sustaining and
justifying every capacity and energy that His will
has set in action, all ownership stands. All claims
are made by Him, through Him, to Him. His
righteousness is the bond of all human fellowship.
And this is so, just because property in outward goods
is but the outcome of personality ; and all human
personality is the issue and image of the personality
of God. In the Divine Fellowship in which God
realizes Himself lies the source and justification of
every fellowship into which man can enter. Man's
authority to say of anything " That is mine " rests,
finally, on his power to say " I am God's."

INDEX

Advent hope, influence on early
Christian conceptions, 101,
108

Agriculture, influence on owner-
ship among primitive tribes,

15

Alienation, 16
Almsgiving. See Charity
" Ambrosiaster," 107, 121, 123
American Indians, North, u, 14
Ames, Dr. W., 139, 143, 147
Amos, 89

Anabaptists, 147, 160
Anglicans, 136, 148, 156
Animals, rudimentary property of

higher, 8

Apologists, second century, 99
Appropriation, 39, 53, 54, 128
Aristotle, x, 27 et seq., 35 et seq., 109,

120, 128
Articles of Religion, Elizabethan,

. ,147
Asceticism, in, 153, 158

Australian tribes, individual and
communal ownership of land
among, 4, 12 et seq.

Bankruptcy, 142

Baxter, Richard, 137, 142 et seq.,

157, 162

Bennett, Dr. W. H., 89 et seq.
Bentham, Jeremy, 49
Bequest, liberty of, 45, 77
Berens, 163
Biblical ideas, vii, xii, 85-116;

Essays V. and VI. passim
Bishops, Puritan revolt against

powers of, 138-9, 144

Boas, 15

Bondservice, 90

Borneo, tribal land systems, 16

Bosanquet, Professor, 57, 60 et seq.

Brazil, land tenure, 15

Brotherhood, xiii, 25, Essay IV.

passim, 119 et seq., 127, 132,

167, 178
Browne, J., 13
Bucer, Martin, 145
Bucknell, Mr., 145
Bullinger, 146-7, 149, 152
Butler, Bishop, xvi

Calvin, 135, 138, 153

Campbell, D., 135

Canon Law, 127 et seq., 129, 138 et

seq., 149, 164
Capital. See also Production, means

of

functions, 36

income, distinction from, 75
Capitalist system, 22, 58, 63, 184

Puritanism, influence of, 138, 153
Carlyle, 146, 164
Carriers, 15

Cartwright, Thomas, 142
Cecil, Lord Hugh, xiv
Character, private property and, x
etseq., 36, 59-64, 74, 184. See
also Personality

Charity, xiv, 96, 98, 119, 120 et seq.,
129, 142, 154, 162, 166, 175,
1 80. See also Poor relief
early Christian view of, 96, 98
Evangelical view of, 166
justice, an act of, xiv, 123, 129,
175, 180

193 O

194

PROPERTY

Charity (contd.) —

mediaeval conceptions of, 120 et

seq.
Puritan conception of, 142, 154,

162

Charles I., poor relief under, 144
Chattel slavery, 20
Chilcotin, 15
Christ. See Jesus Christ
Christian conceptions —

early church, xiii, 37, 93-116
mediaeval, 119-32
modern, xix

post-Reformation, 135-67
Puritan, 135-65

Christian Communism. See Com-
munism

Church and State, 114, 136, 140
failure of early church to co-
ordinate religious and civic
life, xiv, 115

Cicero, 106, 121, 172, 174
Citizenship, 177 et seq., 188
Civil wars in England, 140
Clarendon, 140

Clement of Alexandria, 100 et seq.
Commandments. See Decalogue
Common pastures, 17

enclosure of, 19, 20
Commonwealth administration, 141,

144, 146
Communal ownership, xiii, 4, 12, 31,

39, 58, 125, 188
Communism, 23 et seq., 35, 59, 69,

72 et seq., 121
Aristotle's objections, 36
Christian, early, 24, 121
Plato's theory criticized, 24
Socialism, distinction from, 29
Companies, joint-stock system, 10,

22

Competition, 64, 184
Control, 6. See also State control
Conventional theory, patristic, 120

et seq., 126, 129

Co-operation, xiii, 71 et seq., 76, 189
Court of High Commission, 144
Creeks, 16
Cromwell, 142, 146
Cunningham, Archdeacon, 137
Curr, 13
Cyprian, 103

Dargun, 1 1

Darwin's theory, 54

David, 87

Davidson, Dr. A. B., 91

Debt-slavery, 18

Decalogue, 146, 156, 165

Eighth Commandment, Hebrew
view of, 90 ; Puritan view
of, 146

Defoe, 141, 144

Dickinson, Mr. Lowes, 61

Dissent, 141, 145

Distribution, right of, 128, 130

Donatists, 124

Dress-
Puritan attitude, 152
Quaker attitude, 157
Wesley's attitude, 157

Durkheim, 61

Dyaks, 16

"Economic rationalism," 151
Eliot, Sir John, 145
Equity, Lactantius's view of, 105
Europe, Western, mediaeval or-
ganization, 19
Evangelical revival, 165
Evolution of property, historical,

3:3i

Expropriation, compulsory, 36
Eyre, 4, 1 3
Ezekiel, 91

Factory legislation, 189
Familists, 160
Family, 25, 73, 77
Family ownership, 13
Fellowship, 187, 191
Fifth Monarchy men, 160
Financier, 23
Fox, G., 157
Freedom. See Liberty
French Revolution, 177 et seq.

Gambling, 78
Gavelkind, custom of, 45
General will, 30

Germany, land alienation in medi-
aeval, 1 6

God, Essays IV., V., and VI. passim
biblical idea of, 86 et seq.
Divine sanction, xii, 86 et seq.,
148 et seq.

INDEX

19S

God (contd.) —

fatherhood of, 94
sovereign rights, 86, 191
stewardship. See Stewardship

Good, general. See Well-being

Good works, Puritan view of, 154

Government, authority of. See State

authority
evolution of responsible, 80

Gratian, 38, 127 et seq.

Green, Professor Thomas Hill, 56

Gregory of Nazianzus, 98

Grey, 4, 13

Grotius, 141

Guanas, 18

Haddon, 15

Haldane, Lord, viii

Hall, Dr. T. C., 167

Hammond, 20

Harnack, xiv, xix, 108

Harrison, Major-General, 161

Hebrew ideas, 86-93

Hegel, 53, 56> lSl

Hobbes, 40 et seq., 80, 172, 176

Hobson, 151

Hooker, R., 148, 156

Hooper, John, 138

Horace, xviii

Hosea, 89

Houses, communal occupation, 16

Humanity, religious view of, 86, 106

Hume, 47 et seq.

Idealism, 30, 173
Idealism, German, 56, 181
Illumination, the, 141
Income —

capability, a criterion as to, 76
capital, distinction from, 75
Independents, 140
Individualism, xv, 21, 27, 35, 46, 55,
91 ; Essays III., IV., and VI.
passim, 175 et seq., 185
Puritan movement, effect of, xv,

137 etseq.
restriction of ownership due to,

28, 182

Individuality, social side of, 186
Industrial system, rise of, 21, 136,

157, i73» 177
Inheritance, 14, 45, 63, 77

Initiative, 78, 81, 151

Instinct, 6

Interest, 62, 138, 141 et seq. See

also Usury
Investments, 22, 138
Iroquois, n, 16
Isaiah, 89

Jeremiah, 91

Jesus Christ, xiii, 93 et seq.

Job, 92

John the Baptist, 93

Justice —

early Christian view of, 104 et
seq., 115, 123 et seq.

utilitarian view of, 48
Juxon, Bishop, 139

Kant, 51 et seq., 55

Karaya tribes, 16

Kayans, 16

Kiffin, William, 146

Kingdom of God, Essay IV. passim,

161
Knox, John, 141

Labour, 10, 21, 26 et seq., 39 et seq.,

70, 125, 151, 154, 177, 182
control by means of property, 10
modern economic conditions, 21,

182

oppressive conditions of, 154
Puritan view of, 151 et sea.
right to products of labour,
theory of, 10, 26 et seq., 39
et seq., 70, 125, 177

Lactantius, 104-7

Laissezfaire, 55, 137, 141, 144, 157

Land, 4, 12 et seq., 89

Lang, 13

Latimer, Hugh, xv, 138, 148, 162

Laud, 139 et seq.

Law, William, 158

Leonard, Miss, 144

Levellers, 148, 160, 163

Leviticus, 90

Levy, Hermann, 136, 144

Liberty, x, 9, 59 et seq., 173, 177
et seq.

Libraries Act, Free, 55

Lilburne, 161

Liquor traffic, 160

196

PROPERTY

Locke, 26 et seq., 40 et seq., 70, 125,

177

Lollard movement, 135, 160
Lord's Prayer, the, 112, 115
Lucian, xiii
Luther, 135, 138, 152, 153, 176

Mackworth, Sir Humphrey, 144

Maitland, 20

Malachi, 92

Manorial system, 17, 19

Marshall, Professor, 136

Marx, Karl, 46, 50, 153

Mbaya, 18

Means of production. See Produc-
tion, means of

Mediaeval theological theory, xiv,
119-132

Messianic idea, 93

Methodists, 159

Meyer, Dr. Johannes, 141

Micah, 89, 91

Milton, 152

Monarchy —

limitation of powers, 41
Puritan attitude towards, 144

Monasteries, suppression of, 136

Monastic ideal, 115, 126

Money-lending, 36, 100, 132

Monopolies, 75, 79, 145 et seq., 156
Parliamentary opposition to
Stuart monopolies, 139

Morgan, 16

Morice, Father, 15

Mosaic law, 88, 139, 142, 156

Monster, 147, 161

Natural law, xv, 24 et seq., 37, 40,

71, 120, 124, 127 et seq., 141,

146, 172, 177
Necessaries of life, right of mankind

to, xv, 130, 147
Nehemiah, 91
New South Wales, tribal land

system, 5
Nieboer, 19
Niewenhuis, 16
Nobility, origin in tribal military

organization, 18
Nonconformists, 153

38

Oppression, 91, 154
Orme's Life of Kijfin, 146

Pastoral tribes, conditions among, 1 8
Patristic theory, 120 et seq., 146, 174
Penn, William, 140
Personality, x etseq., 28, 53, 54, no,

1 1 6, 175 et seq., 185 et seq.

See also Character
social character of, xviii, 186
Petermann, Dr., 13
Philanthropy. See Charity
Philosophical theory, 35-64, 120
Piety, Lactantius's view of, 105
Plato, 23, 35, 127
Pleasure —

general well-being, distinction

from, 40, 47, 57
Puritan view of, 152
Political control, 16, 80
Poor relief, 90, 144, 155, 158,

162, 164, 175, 1 80. See also

Charity
Population, effect of over-population

among primitive peoples, 18
Post-Exilic prophets, 9 1
Power, association of property with,

x, 9, 17 et seq., 75 et seq., 183
Preaching^ of Peter, The, 98
Presbyterians, 148
Price, Puritan view of, 143, 154, 156
Primitive peoples, conditions among,

4, 12 et seq.

Privy Council, 140, 144
Production, means of, 21, 31, 74 et

seq. See also Capital
State control, 31, 80
Protestant Reformation. See Re-
formation

Psychological basis of property, 8
Puritanism, 136-67

Quakers, 153, 157, 159, 160
Queen Elizabeth's Primer, prayer in,
179

Rauschenbusch, W., 92
Reformation, influence of, xv, 135-

. 67, 175
Religious ideas of property, Essays

IV., V., and VI.
Rent, 139, 154

INDEX

197

Responsibility, private property and,
22, 73, 79 ; Essays IV., V.,
and VI. passim

Riches. See Wealth

Ritchie, Professor, 57

Roman Empire, difficulties of early
Christians under, 109 et seq.

Roth, Ling, 16

Rousseau, 173, 177 et seq., 187

Russian mir, 17

St. Ambrose, 121 et seq., 129

St. Augustine, 122, 124 et seq., 130

et seg., 1 74.
St. Gregory, 123
St. Hilary of Poitiers, 122
St. Jerome, 130
St. Matthew, 95
St. Paul, 97, no
St. Peter, 98, no
St. Peter Damian, 129
St. Thomas Aquinas, xv, 128 et seq.
Salvian, 122
Schoolmen, mediaeval, 126 et seq.,

J75

Schroder, 16, 18
Seligmann, Dr. and Mrs., 1 1
Seneca, 109, 121
Serfdom, 18
Shaftesbury, Lord, 166
Shepherd of Hernias, The, 99
Shushwaps, 15
Simpkinson, 161
Simmel, 61

Sin, ownership impaired by, 163
Slavery, x, 18, 19, 89, 109 et seq.

early Christian view of, 109 et

seq., 113

Social contract, 172 et seq.
Social reform, 30, 63, 80, 89, 94,
115, 161

early Christian view of, 113

Hebraic tendencies, 88 et seq.
Socialism, 29 et seq., 46, 50, 62, 74

Communism, distinction from,

*9» 74

Society, recognition by and protec-
tion of, 68 et seq.

Socrates, 176

Sombart, 150

Spencer, Herbert, 54

Star Chamber, 144

State authority, xii, xvi, 38, 41, 52
et seq., in, 125 et seq., 132,
145, 1 88

State control, xii, xvi, 31, 55, 80,
124, 166, 178, 189

State endowment, 78

State ownership, 3 1 . See also Com-
munal ownership and Social-
ism

Stephen, Sir James, 166

Stewardship to God, vii, 88, 94, 102,
149 et seq., 154, 156, 159,
165, 167, 175, 186, 191

Stoicism, xv, xix, 37, 107, 121

Stuarts, 139

S wanton, 14

Tawney, 19 et seq.

Taxation, 41, 55, 180

Taylor, Jeremy, 154, 156

Teaching of the Apostles, The, 98

Tertullian, 103

Testament, Old and New. See

Biblical ideas
Theft, xv, ii, 43, 130, 146

necessity, theory of extreme, xv,

J47

Thlinkeets, 14
Torres Straits, 15
Trades, morally doubtful, 99, 160
Trades Boards Act, 154
Trade unions, 188
Tribal conditions. See Primitive

peoples, conditions among
Troeltsch, 136
Truelove, Samuel, 145
Tsimshian, 15
Two Ways, The, 96
Tyndale, William, 135

Ulpian, 124
Unemployment, 145
Uniformity, Act of, 153
Use, association of property with, x, 9,
17, 26, 45, 72 etseq., 128, 130
Usury, 36, 100, 138, 141
Utilitarianism, 40 etseq., 46 et seq., 54

Veddas, u, 14
Vinogradoff, 19

Voluntary associations, 77, 166
Von Martius, 15

IQ8

PROPERTY

Wealth-
creation of, 70

distribution, 35, 47, 58

early Christian indifference to,
108, in

inequalities of, divine sanction
of, 150

inequalities of, general consent
to, 26

inequalities of, origin and de-
velopment of, 17 et seq.

Puritan view of use of, 101, 137
et seq., 148, 151

Wealth (contd.}—

responsibilities of, 1 62, 1 64
spiritual handicap of riches,

100

Weber, Max, 136

Well-being, promotion of, 40, 50 et
seq; 57, 7i, 88, 95, 147, 149,
!54

Wesley, John, 151, 158
Whitgift, 147

Wilberforce, Archdeacon, 165
Woolman, John, 1 64
Wyclif, John, 135, 163, 174

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